Excited to Kick-Off NSHL25

The Colorado Avalanche will have to wait until Day 4 on the schedule to hoist their NSHL24 Stanley Cup Championship banner to the rafters - and oh how exciting that will be for Avs fans!

But there's a lot of other things to be excited about as the 25th NSHL season is set to get under way on Monday.

Four new franchises have joined the league, meaning eight new teams across the NSHL and MSHL and four new faces that are (hopefully) excited to experience the world of sim hockey - our world that is: a real league based off fake players. The league is real.. Get it right.

CAVALRY players will make their MSHL debuts in what will be an interesting learning curve for everyone. Will they have a major impact? Are they just depth pieces to fill out the bottom half of rosters? Is their default EN and DU too high?

There have been some upgrades to the rulebook that help modernize and streamline things a bit better.

Additionally, familiarity for many. The PSC is back as is KOTR. HockeyNights and The Ladder have a mash-up that should make things a lot easier for everyone to understand and participate.

It's cold af in Southern Ontario as this is being written. Some say the coldest day of the year. Perhaps hell is freezing over?

...it must be time for the NSHL season to begin!

Schedule Draw Done; Let the Games Begin

On Sunday afternoon the league held the NSHL25 Schedule Draw to determine team assignments within its brand-new, custom 28-team team schedule.

The draw itself is nothing exciting for most with "just tell me where I end up.." being a unified sentiment. But the meaning behind the process (not to mention the effort that goes into it) is where the value is.

Transparency.

The league office is making its best effort to open up as many doors as it can to let all teams in on how the sausage is made. This applies not just for the schedule, but will be a growing theme moving forward and comes completely from GM feedback.

The Commissioner is in the process of modernizing the Rulebook to create as much transparency as possible and also provide as much clarity as possible by a format re-design.

"For so long we had the same cast of characters and for the most part, they all just knew how things worked and what things meant. Over the past couple of seasons we have had significant (and extremely positive) growth which means not everyone knows where to find the milk, bread and coffee in the morning. Hopefully the time I'm investing right now will help everyone in all aspects of our league." The Commissioner told reporters gathered outside his favourite exclusive dessert spot Let's Mangia Cake.

A Bit About the New Look Schedule

A 28-team schedule is a bit of a tricky one in terms of finding balance. 7 teams per division means you can't have "just" division games, ever. Not when the NSHL strives for games played balance: you always have to have a team playing someone outside the division.

Upon review you'll see teams have to play crossover games while their division mates are playing one another, it is what it is and we'll learn to live with it.

There is some familiarity as NSHL and MSHL teams will play on the same day - a feature introduced several seasons ago to prevent a player playing an entire season in both leagues.

Teams play a maximum of three games at home or on the road and while the balance across all teams is not perfect, the league intends to bring the amount of home "streaks" and road "streaks" to identical levels in the future.

One change the league will be monitoring this year is fewer rest days. There are a total of 10 across the entire 80 game schedule with three of those applied during the three sets of home and home series teams have to close out the season. We'll learn how this impacts goalies and skater health, which when combined with a change this season to goalie recovery time (TBA), depth at goaltending will play a big part as the league moves forward.

Days 11-22 will host the PSC and feature entirely inner-conference match-ups. We lose the fun division v division PSC brackets that matched the schedule and created some interesting outcomes, but with 28 teams, changes had to come (to the schedule and PSC entries!).

We're really close to being ready to go with the Rulebook release coming soon. ALL teams should be getting their rosters and lines submitted so the league knows you're ready to roll.

Pitter-patter...