Hi everybody.
Sedsey: I don't think that the league is all up in arms because your team won the Cup last season. I, for example, thought it cool that an underdog team won. I know it's impossible not to feel attacked when people want to outlaw a strategy that helped you win the Cup. But the truth is that many GMs, myself included, feel that it is ridiculous to have five skaters playing the entirety of a sixty minute hockey game. Playing guys out of position is one thing, and you can point to many real-life situations where that happens. But putting the same group of guys on every single line that hits the ice? I think that most of us will agree that this is unacceptable. Or maybe not. We really need to put this up for a vote.
My opinion:
I don't mind seeing players played out of position....especially on special teams.
I had been thinking that forwards shouldn't play D, or vice-versa, but after reading some good real-life examples, I think it's OK.
What I would like to see is the practice of playing the same five guys on every line outlawed.
Nobody can point to ANY real-life situation where a coach doesn't make a single line change in a game. The argument that "this isn't real-life" doesn't seem valid when we already base things retirements and draftable players on real-life.
In real-life, there have been a few situations where guys get triple-shifted....but not on every set of lines, for the whole game.
I think it should be OK to have guys double-shifted, but not triple-shifted. There should be at least 10 different guys that see ice time on a team's lines.
We could enforce a rule like this programmatically, with a simple program that would go through a team's lines and check each set of lines (5 on 5, 4 on 4, 5 on 4, 5 on 3, 4 on 5, 3 on 5), making sure that at least two different lines are used per each set.
What does everybody think? I think that a fair compromise can be achieved that sees this league run with a good balance between fantasy and reality.
