Fictional League - talent drought year 6-10 question

[Tiger Fan]

Not sure if there are that many of us that play fictional leagues but really hoping someone has some insight on working with junior leagues.

What I am trying to do I think should be fairly simple if I can determine the right number of junior teams and the player development settings.

I want a simple 6 team pro league and then 12 minor league teams (6 unaffiliated) which can be either all in 1 league or split between 2. I want to feed them with a junior structure that consists of a Canadian Junior League and a US Junior League. I want the majority of the players coming from Canada so I have been experimenting with 18 Canadian Junior teams (100% Canadians, no foreign-born players) in one league with a league quality level of 0.70. Then a second Junior League based entirely in the USA with 6 teams and I set it at a league quality level of 0.50. I also want the draft to be of 20 year olds only and the junior leagues to allow players from 16-20 rather than the default 16-18 in league creation. I can edit that but it means the first two draft classes are basically empty. I like a pre-play of a few years to build some history so I can deal with that if there is no way to have 19-20 year olds in the first year of a fictional junior league. I also use era appropriate finance numbers but turn all free agency, salary cap type items off so financials are as simple as can be -like OOTP reserve clause era.

All seems to work fairly well. A few Americans get drafted high each year but mainly it is the Canadian Junior players. The minor league teams seem to be functioning okay as well but the 1 problem I am seeing is the original game created players (pro, minor and Junior) are perhaps much better than the ones that come after league creation.

I assume that is the issue as in multiple tests there is a talent gap in the drafts from about year 6-10 in my universe where very few draft picks play much in the NHL league. It levels off after that and looks really good (and I especially like that there are some high draft picks that bust) but for that brief spell as the game transitions to post-year one created players in draft classes the rookie crop is somewhat subpar.


So the question I have is how do I eliminate the little hiccup from years 6-10 or so where very few draftees play much in the pro league because the original created players are still too strong in comparison.

Should I be tweaking the talent quality level in league creation higher (maybe 0.8 for Canadian Jr and 0.60 for US Jr) or is there something else I could consider? I tried it but did not seem to make a difference. Is my change in the game to a 20 year old draft from the default 18 perhaps the cause? This is not a 1-time thing. I have tried more than a dozen setups with the same basic configuration and see the same results with so many draftees in years 6-10 playing very few NHL games in their career and then it goes back to normal around year 13. Or do I need a higher ratio of junior/pro teams to get a bit more high-end talent. Right now it is 4-to-1 with 24 junior and 6 NHL teams. Should it be higher?

I can certainly live with it or manually edit some players but would be nice if there was a less work-intensive way of smoothing things. I assume the issue is the original junior created players on league start-up are somewhat better than the ones that get added as 15-16 year olds in junior drafts as the league progresses. It balances out as that original crop of juniors pass their peak years as a pro.

[skirmish]

I'll give you some of my thoughts, but take it all with a grain of salt. I think all of us who play fictional leagues do need to be willing to experiment and do a bit of 'management' in the way of edits to keep things balanced. We all play with different setups so what works for one person might not work for the next.

That being said, there is definitely an ebb and flow to talent as the game switches from the initial pool of generated players to ones that are generated year-by-year and have a full junior career before hitting the pros.

The general rule of thumb that I've picked up off the forum previously is a ratio of 1:1 to 1:2 between the number of teams in the top league and the junior leagues. More than this risks generating too many quality players for the number of teams in your league. You only mention the rise and fall in talent, not the actual star levels. I know that I once played a league with a ratio of 1:3, and after three or four seasons I had throngs of 3-star 18- and 19-year-olds taking over the league (and needing to play on the fourth line, such was the depth of talent). I stopped playing that game, but I can definitely see how these initially generated super-players would block out future draftees for 5-10 years. So I don't think adding more junior teams is the answer.

I don't think increasing junior league quality is the answer either. 0.7 is probably the high end of what you want for a junior league. IIRC, the CHL leagues are in the 0.65-0.68 range.

The only solution to the problem that I can think of is to be creative with league expansions to control the spread of talent. I can think of two ways to do this:
1. Start with a smaller major league, and then expand it when the inital glut of super-players starts to hit around seasons 3 or 4 in order to spread the major league talent more thinly. If you don't want to expand your major league, you could bring in a competing major league to steal away some of your players (though this would have a less immediate effect they could only steal players away as contracts expire).
2. Start with a smaller junior league to limit the number of initial junior players generated. Once the initial crew is drafted, expand the junior league so that more players (and hence more quality players) start to be generated going forward.

In reality it may need a combination of both and you'd need to monitor the talent levels across all your leagues to find the right time to bring them in. I haven't tested this so I can't guarantee how it would work, but seems like it could work?

As an aside - you say you've had a 100% Canadian junior league as well as an American junior league. In my experience, if I set up an NHL-like major league that is split mostly between Canadians and Americans, any junior leagues that are connected to the league will have the same nationality proportions as the major league and it is not possible to have a 100% Canadian league (at least initially - the correct nationality proportions are generated in following years for the new junior intake, but it takes about five years for this to balance out). Wondering whether you have found a way around this issue...

[Tiger Fan]

Thanks for the suggestions. Some good things I will try there. I want to keep major league small (6-8 teams) and with an original six era feel but have been experimenting with more unaffiliated minor leagues but not expansion to the major league. Although I don't really want to expand my Major league but perhaps using your suggestion of expansion will work for the junior league. If I start smaller with the junior leagues and add teams after a season or two are in the books perhaps it would lower the number of initial game created junior players which are the cause of the year 6-10 issue.

The dominance of the initial created junior players as the league progresses is a clearly noticeable difference though. In a number of test leagues with slightly different structures to solve the issue I consistently see players who were in the league creation junior class (1940 in my tests) were prominent on the Pro League career leader boards even 80 years later. I left everything else identical, so league never varied in games played or goals per game settings from year to year but when one looks at the career leaders in 2020 after 80 seasons and sees that 13 of the top 14 career scoring leaders all were junior players in 1940 (so initial player creation) something is clearly wrong between the quality of talent in league creation vs future drafts.


In answer to your final point about the 100% Canadian and 100% American junior leagues it does seem to be working for me. I set up the pro league as from the US & Canada (Believe I also set the region to OHL draft region although that likely doesn't matter). I set player creation to 97% Canadian, 3% American and 0% rest of the world. I used the same structure for each of my minor leagues. Then for the junior league I choose Canada and all of Canada as the region with that nationality set to 100% Canadian. For the US junior league I selected American and the region was US Midwest that I used (again don't think that matters as I will edit names of all my teams anyway) and player and draft creation to 100% US.

I found when I created the junior leagues the nationality was nearly exactly what I requested. There were no Americans in the Canadian league in initial creation but there were 4 or 5 European/Russians in it. Everyone else was Canadian so it was not to difficult to edit the few of them I needed to. Same for the US league. It was entirely American except for a couple of Europeans on initial creation. In all draft classes the mix was nearly exactly as requested in setup - 100% Canadian in the Canadian Jr League draft and 100% American in the US jr league draft although for some reason every few years a european player would sneak into the mix for some reason. But overall the nationality setup is working nearly perfectly.