So, you have joined a fantasy sim hockey league, a grown up man playing like a child, daydreaming about managing a real NHL team...
...or, as some of you would put it to make up an excuse for yourself, and even more your partner: ”a game that tests your analytic and strategic abilities”. Never the less it’s still a game allowing you to be what you never managed to be in your real life. Even though we never met this is not the only thing I can tell about you.
Because if you’re in a fantasy SIM hockey league you’re bound to be one or more of the following stereotypes.
The Tradeaholic
This is usually the first guy you notice as you join. He will be the first one to welcome you and make you an offer for one or more of your top players. He will change strategy for his team depending on what is available on the trade market.
He could change from win now-mode to rebuild back to win now before the season has even started! When there’s nothing left to be traded he usually loses interest and moves on to another league.
The youth lover/rebuilder
Just like the tradeaholic this GM is always looking to trade. He considers every player over 24 years of age close to retirement and will not hesitate to trade away what others would consider franchise material and natural captains for much younger players with the potential to reach a higher level at that age, which will be in three to five seasons.
What the rebuilder forgets is that a year IRL will see at the most a little more than two SIM-seasons. In other words; it will take two to three years in real life before the rebuild reaches its potential.
By then either the league has shut down or the rebuilder lost his patience and quit. In the unlikely event of both the league and the rebuilder still being around the rebuilder will now start trading the great 25 year-olds, in exchange for even more talented youngsters...
The ”all in”-guy
The opposite of the youth lover/rebuilder is the ”all in”-guy. He will gladly drain his team on youth, picks and prospects with the ambition to acquire players that will help him win now. To him there is no tomorrow.
He doesn’t care about age or contract as long as the player acquired has slightly better stats than what he trades away. Forced into rebuilding after the season ended, offering assets not everyone will be asking for, this impatient GM often moves on to another league leaving the sinking ship to his successor.
The lowballer
Every league has them, the guys that instead of asking and listening to your needs when trading explain to you what you need and why. Since their offers will make little or no sense at all to you they also need to explain why the offer actually is great.
That often includes the paradox of telling you that the guy they are targeting on your team actually is crap and their minor players, prospects and picks will make you a winner in a year or two. Why the assets they offer wont make themselves a winner if they held on to them is much harder for them to explain though.
And don’t be surprised if the lowballer accuses you to be a lowballer as you turn down his offers. Quite often the lowballer actually turns out to also be...
The ”real life” guy
This is the guy that is so fanatic about real life hockey that he either doesn’t understand or simply refuses to accept that he is in a fantasy SIM hockey league. He could have played hockey himself, coaches a junior team, plays a lot of EA Sports NHL video games or just watches a lot of hockey on TV.
Hence he thinks he knows the ”true value” of all the players. He will trade players he doesn’t like IRL, that he feels are overrated IRL or that just had a bad year IRL. On the opposite he will gladly accept the players he like as huge assets, no matter how they look in the SIM.
He could be taken advantage of by others or simply trash a team and its future on his own, if not chaperoned.
The analyst (aka the statistics nerd)
Unemployed or just under-stimulated at work this guy create excel documents and formulas for anything there is to analyze. Unlike the ”real life”-guy he doesn’t care about names or reality at all.
To him numbers are everything. He gladly shares all the statistics on high and low’s, averages and ages with the goal to understand how to build the perfect team and ultimately break the code to the sim, ensuring him endless victory and fame.
Name-dropper
This is the guy who has a sister, who had a friend that used to live next door to Gretzky. Or the guy that tells you how player X and Y used to go to his uncle’s restaurant after practice. Or that Silfverberg, Jernkrok and Markstrom comes from his obscure little village in Sweden. Or how he delivers propane to Corey Perry’s house for that matter...
The name-dropping might give him his 15 minutes of fame, but most likely only trigger the next name-dropper to enter the stage.
The no show-guy
A.k.a. Jesus. Everybody talks about him but no one has ever seen him...
He doesn’t show up for the draft, he doesn’t send in lines and he doesn’t reply to your chat messages or emails. Then suddenly he shows up, explaining how he just moved, work has been hectic or badgers chewed off the Internet cable. Then he disappears again and will be fired after a few more weeks.
Not to be confused with...
The lurker
You may think he’s not there either, but he is. He attends the draft via lists, he sends in his lines on a regular basis and he reads every word in the chat. He just never interacts.
When approached by a commish he will reply to a mail or two telling you he will make no changes. And the commish will never fire him because he takes care of all his duties, except those who requires interacting.
The illiterate
Every league has rules and guidelines. Every league has put them down in writing and made them easy to access for every GM. Often it’s even indexed, with clickable links from the index to the right chapter. Soooo easy, right?
Still, there’s always at least one in every league that seem to be illiterate. This person will always ask the others about the rules, drafting procedures or any other league matter instead of reading the rules. Some think it’s because the person is lazy and want other people to do the work for him.
I prefer to think the person either has dyslexia (what a mean name for that problem btw!) or is simply illiterate. Either way, this person is appreciated at least by...
The extra commish
This is the guy that always wanted to be the commish or co-commish of a great league like BEARD Hockey. They have studied the rulebook and know it by heart. Or at least they think they do.
They will jump in and answer questions before the commishes get around to it, sometimes correctly sometimes misleading, causing the commishes more work than they asked for.
When they don’t know answers they will speculate and most of the time be believed, since their self confident attitude make people believe they know what they’re doing. Once again, half of the time causing more damage than not.
These people will never really commish a league though since the huge amount of work that has to be done far away from the spotlights is not for them. They are content with the recognition they get from showing off in the chatrooms.
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Without a doubt you have now put labels on most of the other GM’s in the league and most certainly you put more than one label on more than one guy. And you may have even more stereotypes to add to the list.
Questions are: What label do you put on yourself and what label do you think your fellow GM's will put on you?