Couple things on what’s been happening here the past couple days. And I’m at work so trying to type this up when I get a chance so it’ll probably be disjointed but hopefully my thoughts come out clearly.
First off, I only got to watch the Cav-Indy game for a couple minutes but it definitely looked good. As a guy who grew up in the 80s-90s it’s amazing how realistic the games have gotten. My son tries to get me to play with him but tbh there are to many freaking buttons and controls! I need the old Nintendo or SNES controllers I grew up with. My fingers don’t work that way so playing 2K with my 14 year old is more of a chore then fun. But watching the simulated game was very cool! Thanks to NewEra and his son for putting it together. Whether it was a diversion or not, lol, it was fun to watch the little bit that I saw!
Next, onto Robin and the Wizards. Yes, taking on an inexperienced GM and someone who was so new to the site in general brought me some hesitation. The fact that SOUL vouched for him definitely gave him the credibility in my mind though that he should be allowed to run the team.
I’ve responded to a few PMs already this morning but since this isn’t going to go away I feel like I should comment publicly.
In an ideal world we would have 30 completely active and involved GMs. If you remember back to year one, I actually had GM activity level as one of five criteria’s for free agency. I knew that inactive GMs could be a downfall for this and wanted to give some reward for the people that put their time into it. But at the time, people were very against that going towards free agency and that metric was taken out of the game. Since that time, we have had a variety of activity levels from the various GMs that have been involved. Doing this off the top of my head but I believe we still have 19 of our original 30 GMs from year one. Most of those 19 are very active with a few exceptions. I feel that almost all of the 11 replacement GMs that have been brought in have been extremely active and have raised the level of competition in the league.
Saying all of that, we currently have no requirement for activity. Some people simply can’t put in the time that others can. As it is now we have about 10-15 extremely active GMs. And then another group that stay involved but are a step below those top GMs. And then a small handful of GMs that are not active at all. As great as it would be if all 30 GMs were as active as that top group, I don’t see it as realistic the way things are set up now. Robin checked in when he needed to. He’s made a couple of trades this offseason so he has actually been more active than a few others. I’m just not sure how you can make people become more invested in this if it’s supposed to be for fun considering people live different lifestyles.
As far as the trades he’s made: I generally don’t like to comment on trades since each GM has their own vision. I’ve thought many GMs have made questionable moves over the years. In 3+ years we’ve had one trade rejected though that I can think of. That was a much different circumstance and had nothing to do with the merits of the actual deal. That trade was done by a GM who traded their best player and then immediately informed me that they were out of the league. This maybe a bad trade when you put it all together with the other moves that Robin has made. But it’s his team as long as he is playing. If you consider it a badly run team, then that is your opinion. I won’t agree or disagree but considering most of us are NY fans, we know that the actual league has poorly run franchises.
The bigger problem IMO is GM activity level. Like I said, it would be great to get all 30 GMs completely invested in this game. I just am not sure how to do it as is.