Hey Everyone
No shortage of BFHL work for me from all directions this summer! Get your feet up, this is a long one.
Firstly, I would like everyone to give a warm welcome to a friend of mine who will be taking over GM duties for Rampage. His name is Johnny and I didn't really get to have too much time to chat with him about this league but I asked him, and he did say he liked numbers, so he's in ;). He's new to sim hockey so you vultures hold back a bit on the rape and pillage of his team. Like maybe wait until at least after the entry draft when I can start adding the new teams and processing all the expansion activities into the game!
Now we've had a lot of change this year with five new GMs so it's a good opportunity for me to welcome them all again and talk about the league structure. I take pride in our league as one that is built on links between family and friends. I like the idea that almost everyone knows at least one person, that it's likely most of us are somewhat similar in stages of life and hopefully there is some common ground with that besides the obvious... that we love hockey.
We all have busy lives and yes, BFHL is just a game, but it's also a fun game and awesome enough that we have an actual trophy to win! The game is only fun if we have a fair amount of participation from all twenty four of us. Nobody should really go MIA for extended periods of time, it's fine to be busy but let's not ignore emails and just fire a quick sorry I'm busy reply at your earliest convenience or something (BTW: Bettbot, sorry I never replied your WhatsApp a couple days ago ;)). It goes the other way too for our more energetic GMs. Don't get pushy and spam people. At anytime, please highlight any issues you may have with myself or the commish team
Let's keep our communications respectful to one another. We are twenty-four people of different backgrounds and cultures. It's pretty easy to offend someone unintentionally and while I love some of your witty banter among friends in the BFHL WhatsApp group chat, we should watch how comfortable our language can get. I'm not looking to police anything here, let's just not get too personal.
Onto league news, I have been waiting for this for a long time. We have an ONLNE Web client for managing our lines! This means you can just go online to any browser and set your lines! No more need to install a client on your computer. It's awesome, but it's new and untested. I'm hoping for more improvements before our season starts, but you can try it out now. Oh, 3 on 3 lines for OT baby, just gotta find where to turn that on 
There are also new league output files. With the new format, I should be able to integrate things more seamlessly within the site but It's work, and work that I suck at, so it will probably take time. We'll see. It's a never ending project, I have never liked the look of the site, yet I don't want to copy some other site and I don't have much time play with it so.... this is what we get lol. At least the output files provided out of the box are pretty good.
I also want to make sure everyone remembers we have auto prospect activation. This means if they have a rating and a contract, they will be activated. What's different this year is that due to the increase in size of the league, we've opened up the players pool to include rated AHLers as well. No more minimum of 10 NHL games played. We also have an existing rule where newly activated prospects, you can choose to put them back onto your prospects list rather than them taking up roster and salary cap space. Up to you to decide how they best fit in your team. We do have a rule for having a minimum 35 players signed on your roster.
Completely new for this year, after a short discussion among the commish team, it was felt that It's probably too frustrating to wait for a prospect to develop into an actual serviceable BFHLer during their NHL entry contract term. To help make prospects a little bit more fun, we will be adding an extra year of service to prospects entering the league on entry level deals. Yes, True Grit wins big with some McDavid guy for 3 years @ 3.775 million instead of 2 years. Win some BFHL cups with all that cap room eh?
On to the administrative side.... While I'm the BFHL admin, I rely heavily on my commish team on various league operational activities but also on everyone in this league for further development and improvements of this league. We want to be a close to NHL sim but some things are an administrative nightmare which I have no appetite to manage. Who knows, as the sim tool progresses with each version, certain things could get easier and we could introduce new things.
One topic I've bantered about in my mind lately is the 35 player roster minimum. I'm not sure It's the right tool for us. We'll see how it goes for now but we will be monitoring it. Another thought is capping the number of prospects you can have on your team. I'm throwing these out now because they've been simmering in my mind long enough and it would be great to get opinions from the rest of you on this or even any other ideas you may have. Normally, I would always want to get feedback from all the GMs for any key changes to the league. I want to keep this league fun and getting feedback from you all is a huge part of that.
So, thanks for reading, welcome again the new guys: Spartans, Samurai, Prince Albert Royals, Kenobi and Rampage. Johnny let me know if you want to step into what is the BFHL WhatsApp chat group. Also big thanks for the BFHL vets that have kept the first seven years oh so interesting.
Looking forward bringing the cup back home in year 8!
Anthony