[G-Force]

This is going to take some legwork, but it's always been my favorite thing to do with sports games so I'm going to attempt to do it here.

The Alltime Hockey Association will begin as a 12 team league. Two six-team conferences.

Regrettably, the game won't let me import players for an initial draft. So the inaugural draft will have to be handled outside the game, for which I have devised an excel spreadsheet.

Once you import players they DO become eligible for the next entry draft, so in subsequent years the draft will be handled in-game.

The overall AHL player pool boasts 1000 players. Utilizing hockey-reference.com's Point Shares, the list includes the top 200 left wings, centers and right wings, the top 300 defensemen and the top 100 goalies.

A random number generator was used to list the players randomly at each position. The first 100 at each of the forward slots, the first 150 defensemen and the first 50 goalies listed will be eligible for the inaugural draft. The rest of the players will enter via subsequent entry drafts. So, while most of the very top players will be in the league from the very beginning, some terrific talent won't enter the league right at the start.

As for the initial draft, the inaugural player pool was ranked 1 to 500 based on win shares. Teams 1 through 16 will pick using a serpentine system. A random number will come out between 1 and 260 (just a little higher than Wayne Gretzky's alltime leading 251 point shares). When it's a team's turn to pick, if the random number is less than the point shares of the highest available player, he's the pick. If not, another number is selected for the next player and so on.

While not perfect, it was the best way to do this given the game's limitations regarding the inaugural draft pool.

Each team will select 6 players at each forward position, 9 defensemen and 3 goalies for a 30 player roster.

As goalies tend to be high in point shares, my only limitation on the draft was that a team couldn't pick more than 2 goalies in the first 10 picks.

This will take a little time to set up, so I'll post some nuggets here and there while I'm going about it. I loved doing this kind of setup with OOTP, where I've done a few popular dynasties. So hopefully this will end up generating a bit of interest and prove a fun idea.


GH