Hello all!
I apologize in advance for the lengthy post, but in between life stuff, I've been slowly working on an update to Global United Hockey. Today, I have a little sneak peak for anyone interested! (if anyone wants to test any iterations of it, feel free to DM me as well). Feedback is appreciated, and any hockey fans from any of these nations, I'd love to hear feedback (or requests).
This is based of of xECK29x's PremierPivot so special thanks to him. I will also be including all of his recent seasons roster updates and player re-rates as well. In addition to the prospect generator included in Pivot, I've included a fairly vast array of players available globally, so scouting around the world can be quite intense, but well worth it.
Another thing that will be a work in progress is expansion team and GUH logos. I am working with few of my artist friends, and hopefully putting together a solid image pack. The last pack I used borrowed heavily from existing packs or logos, but I'd like to give mine a solid custom facelift with some more original art for all fictional teams.
I may space this out in separate posts as I'm working on several different leagues and aspects.
I'm still tweaking the financials, but I think I am happy how the financials work between the NHL/GUH and other professional leagues. Some players make the jump to the NHL, while others stick around outside of North America. Some veterans come over later in their careers and can even be a force in the NHL, so scouting, even outside of the draft years can be beneficial.
Many team names or player names may change by the final release, but here is the work in progress.
Global United Hockey is still a big part of the game, but the NHL game is still the bread and butter. For some of these examples, I had simmed ahead several years, taken control of the Whalers, and slowly built a very good, but not quite good enough team. They won their conference in the regular season, but only made it as far as the conference semi-finals.
I've expanded the NHL to 50 teams. Both expansion, and re-instituted teams from the past. Tentatively called the WHA divisions, a WHA East and WHA West seed in a playoff format with their NHL counterparts. WHA is a placeholder name, and I may rename this, just to not confuse any of bkarchitect projects (whom I admire and have a been a big fan of his work). Different this time around, the 18 expansion/re-instituted teams have an 82 game season only against the WHA division teams.
WHA East
Hartford Whalers
Indianopolis Racers
Halifax Highlanders
Baltimore Bandits
Birmingham Bulldogs (The Bulls are an SPHL team, and the Bulldogs are defunct professional team, so I created this connection)
Quebec Nordiques
Hamilton Tigers
Cleveland Barons
Atlanta Thrashers
WHA West
Portland Buckeroos
Saskatoon Silver Foxes
Milwaukee Stags - There was a Michigan Stags previously in the WHA, and thought Milwaukee would be a cool spot for an NHL team)
California Golden Seals
Kansas City Scouts
Houston Aeros
Albuquerque Armadillos
Hawaii Honu
Anchorage Arctic Wolves
The playoff sections may look odd, but using the Eastern conference as an example, here:
The NHL divisions stay the same, but each conference has a WHA division that seeds into their playoff format. Each conference Playoff format follows this format. Top 14 teams in each conference make it to the first round. Seed 15 plays seed 18, and seed 16 plays seed 17 in a preliminary best of 5 to make it into the first round. These leaves 7 teams in each conference (14 total) entered into the draft lottery.
I decided to cut out my Mexican expansion teams, as much as I liked them geographically, there was too many weird behaviors having a team based in Mexico as a nation, that didn't behave the same as their US or Canadian counterparts. A work around was to fudge it, and make them an American team, but playing in a Mexican city, but I didn't like that, so I dropped it all together.
I've tried to pre-set each expansion team with a fairly balanced roster, BUT each team should have a franchise player. This is a work in progress, but trying to give each team a player to build around. Aged 18 to 28, this franchise player gives each expansion team something to build around.
Since that is a work in progress, here is the Hartford Whalers franchise player, Howie Gore. Howie's twin brother Harry Gore plays for the Houston Aeros. Both named after Gordie Howe, I felt it would be interesting to give both teams a modern version of a super star.
The NHL in the year 2033 has had an eclectic group of cup winners, but it can be a fun challenge, if you choose it to be!
Anyways, this is what I'll share for tonight.
Next up:
Olympics
World Championships
World Junior Championships
AHL
SPHL
NHL Divisional exhibition tournaments (with the NHL and expansion teams not meshing in the regular season, I wanted to make a cross over tournament at the beginning of the season for exhibiton games. example: The Adams Division tournament
Global United Hockey
Global United Hockey minor
Global United Hockey U22
Global United Hockey U18
