To all who joined the possible (kinda) ML Dynasty League or even pondered it:
Friday morning, Chris(cpetsche), who spent 2 ½ days at my cottage, as he has been doing pretty well twice a year (in the spring to put the dock in and in the fall to remove the dock), and I received a call from Brendan, a developer from WIS. I will summarize the gist of the call, which confirmed a couple of assumptions that many of the WIS hockey owners have had since Mike Welch left.
First of all, I have to say that both the current president of WIS and Brendan were totally in favour of this league becoming a reality, and though it took over 2 months to hash out all the possibilities, I never got the impression that it was dead from the get-go.And yes, the idea which I was so hoping would come to fruition is dead, at least in the form we all wanted, using exclusively ML players. And the reason is not their fault.
It appears that after Mike Welch left WIS, and it was taken over by new owners, they changed many things there. The big change they made, specifically, was that whatever they did made it impossible to have a team exclusively involving ML players. Since then, ownership changed again, I think from Fox Sports to StubHub, not sure. But the fact remained, under the new ownership, that it is impossible to have a team composed exclusively of ML’ers. I even suggested that I would sit down and randomly produce 120 of each FWD position, but that still would not be a solution. The fact remains that a team cannot be made of all ML’ers.
As you are all aware, there have been no updates since Mike Welch left WIS, and most of you assumed that it is because the hockey portion of WIS is the ugly stepchild of the site. That assumption is correct and was confirmed by Brendan. Nothing has been done for the hockey site because, of all the sports on the WIS site, hockey generates the least revenue for WIS. Obviously, hand in hand with that is the fact that they have done nothing to attract new owners.
I was not aware of this, but it appears that all the other sports on WIS have recently been given an incentive for players on the site. For example, on the opening day of the baseball season, evidently WIS calculated the number of home runs hit (I think there were 13 or 15) and gave users 13% or 15% off the purchase of a 6-pack. When Chris brought up that point with Brendan and suggested why that couldn’t be done for hockey owners as well. He suggested something like the total goals scored in the first 2 games of the finals, maybe, or something that would at least show that they care, albeit just a little, about the hockey site and its owners. Brendan said he would bring it up with the president at the next meeting.
There is ONLY one way we could create a league where players could be renamed, and it would include their stats from the database, not the attributes one finds for an ML player. It could be done either by drafting only players with a $165k salary or by capping the maximum salary at a specific amount. In effect, it would be a league composed of renamed players and their stats from the database, and could possibly include 1 ML at each position, but that would be it. Not sure if there would be any interest in such a league, but if there were, I would not mind starting one.
?I get the feeling that if the previous admin at WIS had not made the changes they did that made it impossible to create a team of just ML’ers, this would be a go. And, of course, if there were anyone at WIS who would willingly undertake making the changes so that a team of ML’ers could be a possibility, that might make the idea feasible as well.
But as it stands, there appears to be no interest in improving the quality of the hockey part of WIS. Sad to say, that appears to be the rule. Kinda strange, given that if more effort were put into improving the site and attracting new owners, the site would generate more income for WIS overall.
I guess the best we can hope for is some kind of incentive, as the other sports receive, and we don’t.
Mike