Date: Mon Feb 27 09:10:14 2006
Sender: Jay Schlegel
Yes, I am going through Olympics withdrawl, so here is the idea:
Replace the current DEL Cup with a World Cup based upon players having
different nationalities. World Cup for pro leagues, World Juniors for the
college leagues. Maybe a separate Olympics for a combined pro + college
scenario (only run once per calendar year).
First, the only way this could possibly work is if injuries are removed
entirely from World Cup. And no healing from injuries during World Cup either.
Yes, a compromise, but it avoids any potential conflict of interest with a
coach intentionally trying to wear out a competitor's star player, and no one
would need to forfeit to protect their players for regular league play.
Unfortunately a side effect is that if a player is injured during normal league
play, then they are suddenly not available for World Cup play either (oh well,
just pick a replacement).
So, how could this possibly work you ask?
Assign each player a nationality. For regular league activities this means
nothing, except maybe for those making up firstnames for their players. This
probably has to be done randomly or at least semi-randomly (e.g., in baseball
there would have to be enough catchers of each nationality to form a legal
roster along with some reserves), though hopefully some of the names actually
fit their nationality.
When it is time for World Cup (or World Juniors for the college leagues), sort
the players into national teams. Initially this would be an expanded roster
which a coach would have to cut down to a legal roster. Instead of 'cutting'
extra players, they just get dumped to a reserve roster sort of like the minor
leagues during post-season (it's there, but nothing happens; so it is just a
holding area).
Prior to playing World Cup games (actually it should probably occur prior to
the rosters being formed), coaches would choose which national team they want
to coach. Either this could be done by seniority, or a commish could juggle
requests, or somesuch (it could even be done randomly). I'd like it to be done
along request lines, so that coaches can hopefully get a national team they can
relate to. The end result is each coach winds up coaching a different national
team. Each coach then has some amount of time to get their roster in order
(like a week or two, maybe with scrimmages too). For this I would suggest a
separate set of roster controls so that they could work on this during the week
while regular league games are ongoing (or at least show a static national
roster during the week, so coaches can begin making plans).
Then the World Cup games start. These would run pretty much as they currently
do, elimination tournament style, on the weekends. At the end a champion is
crowned. Hopefully there will be no doping scandals. Dunno if
preliminary/medal(playoff) round setup could be worked in or not.
Now, what to do about cross-league competition? Are there enough players to
make this work? Are there enough national teams to give each coach a team to
coach? If not, then the competition could occur WITHIN one's own league (i.e.,
just like reassigning all of the league's current players and then playing some
games). But it would be nice if the competition would occur across leagues as
it does now, and would probably work better for coming up with legal rosters
and semi All Star teams anyway. So yeah, you could end up coaching players
from different DEL leagues (e.g., hockey: HEL and IOHL and NOHL and SMFHL
players on the same roster, oh my!). The World Juniors would be tougher since
there is only one college league per sport, so there may not be enough players
-- maybe some pool of 'extra international league players' could be made
available just for World Juniors. Also, maybe some recently-retired players
might be made available for World Cup?
I just saw something about PRs being removed from DEL Cup, but I think they
should be added back for something like this. Since World Cup would not be
DEL-league-specific and there are no league bragging rights, and someone could
monitor it, maybe it would work.
So, what do you think?
[Disclaimer: obviously Andy would have to take the time to implement this, so
there is no guarantee that it would happen anytime soon. But it is worth
discussing.]
Date: Mon Feb 27 10:04:37 2006
Sender: Jay Schlegel
And another thing...
What if there are not enough coaches for all of the national teams? Then those
teams do no participate that go-round. No need to bring Coach Bob into this.
What if there are too many coaches? Dunno... Some could co-coach, or choose
to skip it if they so desire?
If Olympics are to be included (pro and college on same roster), they could
replace one of the World Cup go-rounds. This could be alternated throughout
the calendar year, so that only one sport at a time is doing Olympics, and the
others will do regular World Cup. It occurs to me that this may not work,
since I think the college and pro attributes are not on the same scale, but
maybe we can come up with a way.
Date: Mon Feb 27 11:44:20 2006
Sender: Jeff Luddingsmash
I like it.
Date: Mon Feb 27 13:29:10 2006
Sender: Johnny Gunn
That would be awesome, great idea Jay! Don't have time to comment on it too
deeply right now.
Date: Mon Feb 27 14:13:33 2006
Sender: Jay Schlegel
While I am 'vision'ing...
What if your league's top player is randomly assigned to the Galapagos Islands
National Team (I know they're not a country, it's just an example), and no
coach takes the Falklands for World Cup? Well then, that player doesn't play
in that particular World Cup. Might be an incentive for some enterprising
coach to take up coaching the Galapagos next time.
Also, I don't necessarily think we should 'lock in' coaches to particular
national teams the way we do teams/schools in the various leagues. Maybe set
some sort of randomized selection process where coaches prioritize say their
top 5 picks? Maybe a rotation among coaches (Coach A gets USA this time, Coach
B gets USA next time and Coach A gets some other country)? Maybe since the
talent will be randomized and there will be no 'home field' coaches will be
more likely to want teams other than USA and Canada? Could be very confusing
to keep changing teams though.
Date: Mon Feb 27 14:32:10 2006
Sender: Marc Byers
I like the idea, I want New Zealand!....lol
Date: Mon Feb 27 15:54:46 2006
Sender: Steve Handley
Let's do it!!
Date: Mon Feb 27 23:27:58 2006
Sender: Jay Amado
Yeah! And I got another idea! All the players could be from different planets,
then you can have an intergalactic football game, between every planet. The
winner gets the intergalactic cup...brilliant!!!
Date: Tue Feb 28 05:40:54 2006
Sender: Greg Pearson
My "Olympic moment" was thinking we needed to talk Andy into setting up the DEL
Curling Sim.
Then the Olympics ended and I got better.
Date: Tue Feb 28 08:44:42 2006
Sender: Karim Cheaib
"Yeah! And I got another idea! All the players could be from different planets,
then you can have an intergalactic football game, between every planet. The
winner gets the intergalactic cup...brilliant!!!"
That might get Andy going
Date: Tue Feb 28 12:03:22 2006
Sender: Red Burley
I like the World Cup idea, very much! I think it would increase interest a
great deal. A few thoughts-
1) I would be in favor of coaches selecting their nationality, based on some
kind of seniority system-or perhaps based on their career W-L record in that
sport. And allow them to keep the same team-develop some tradition and
rivalries :-)
2) How is this going to work for the football sim? Im afraid if, say, Japan won
the World Cup of Football, the universe might spontaneously implode . . . maybe
football players could be assigned based on the college they attended?
3) Skip the Olympics part, IMO. If we keep with the real-life "Olympic Ideal",
we will have to pay Andy kickbacks every 4 seasons, and you would have to
institute some random process to ban players due to their using cold medicine
or acne cream . . .
Date: Thu Mar 2 08:13:16 2006
Sender: Jay Schlegel
Interesting... I would have thought there would be more response either way,
but especially with all the flak given over DEL Cup over the years. I wonder
if folks realize that no-comment is the same as a 'no' vote?
Date: Thu Mar 2 10:52:03 2006
Sender: Johnny Gunn
I'm for it, the DEL Cup is losing interest with a lot of coaches, speacially
cause there a ton of injuries that happen. Plus, the seeding is uneven at
best, a few teams throw games, others (like me in pro football), don't play all
of my starters, can't afford it. The World Cup would create a lot of
interest, new records, new stats, new teams, new players, new rivalries, etc...
Of course, there needs to be qualifying rounds leading up to the World Cup,
like RL. So, the countries should be put into regions/groups, for qualifying
rounds. A certain number of spots should be open for each group, according to
the number of teams, & the overall talent of the teams.
I like the idea of being able to have the college kids on the teams, but I
think coaches should be limited to one team, would be unrealistic to have 1
owner coaching 5 teams. Like mentioned above, each nation would have a pool of
players, from ages 18-50+, you would have to cut them down to roster size.
There should be a world rankings page, maybe even with a coaches poll. Also,
maybe would could have an All World All-Star Team, just some ideas.
Date: Fri Mar 3 04:00:40 2006
Sender: Jay Amado
DEL Cup was way funner when there was PR's!
Date: Fri Jul 7 17:51:34 2006
Sender: Omar Wells
Well i think the coaches should pick there players in a draft setting and that
should define there nationality. I am not sure when you would start the cup.
Would you start in the field with about 96 nations and then just move on to the
field of 32? I think it could be real fun thou....Andy should really look into
this idea!
Date: Tue Jan 15 11:17:31 2008
Sender: Jay Schlegel
* * * * * * * bump * * * * * * *
Given the discussions on some of the other DEL boards about how to increase
interest in the sims, I've decided to bring this thread back.
After rereading it, maybe we would have to allow for Coach Bob national teams
to be involved after all, if not enough human coaches are interested in
participating, in order to fill out the brackets and to allow for all players
in a sport to be accounted for somewhere. As I think I was envisioning it,
player nationalities would be assigned once (randomly, by position, which
should keep talent fairly evenly distributed) and not changed after that, with
new players who enter the league being assigned a nationality when their
attributes are generated (or as carried over from the college sim). Though
maybe there should be an allowance where some few players randomly switch
national teams?
In terms of sim mechanics, I wonder if it is do-able to have players 'copied'
to the parallel world cup league. There needs to be a way for the national
team coach to go to the national team page during the week and tinker with the
roster. If it is just a copy then it is updated continuously for
injuries/attribute-changes/etc. from the original league.
Also, if it wasn't clear, this could replace the existing DEL Cup, or be run
separately from it. I think it would be particularly nice for college-only
coaches -- currently pro coaches have a pro team and also get to play in DEL
Cup, whereas college coaches have just the one team. Not sure how a combined
college/pro Olympic level competition could work, so maybe just the separate
World Cup levels would be enough.
Essentially this would have to run on something similar to a DEL season
schedule, since rosters need to be trimmed at some point prior to games
beginning. E.G., if there are say 200 players with your team's nationality
(many of which wouldn't even make a DEL pro/college team, let alone a national
team, but they are currently in the active FA/recruiting pool for that DEL
sport), you cut this to a legal team roster plus a second legal team roster of
alternates (which do nothing other than serve as a holding area to bring
players in for injuries or to change strategy). Should the roster for the
following weekend's game have to be set by a certain time, to allow for
scouting?
What do you think? How could it work? Again, obviously there is no guarantee
that it would happen, but I think it is worth continuing the discussion (i.e.,
it might be that this is quicker/easier for Andy to implement than some of the
other suggestions that have been coming up; and it might be made easier if some
of us sat down and thought through some of the logistics -- proposed
sport-specific nationalities, # players by sport, etc.).
Date: Tue Jan 15 12:25:53 2008
Sender: Laurent Boudias
I would love to be part of the French coaching staff. :)
It would be neat to have a pool of French players in various teams that could
be selected for the national team. Selection, coaching, playing games against
other nations would be cool.
But Andy doesn't seem to have time for enhancing the sim. I'm not sure he would
have time for that.
The project sounds nice though.
Date: Tue Jan 15 15:55:09 2008
Sender: Andrew Sanford
I like the idea.
I think maybe having the nationalities on the player's bio page instead of on
the roster page since I think it would clutter the main page.
I also like the idea of maybe the coaches picking the team, now I would
definitely like the idea of maybe having a sort function between the
nationality so I don't have to go through each team's page.
Date: Thu Jan 17 18:38:08 2008
Sender: Jay Schlegel
Some number-crunching, for HOCKEY world cup...
World Juniors has 41 teams competing in four divisions, which if we allow
regular legal roster plus a pseudo-roster of reserves, would be 41*(25+25)=2050
players needed.
World Cup tournament scheduled for this year has 48 teams competing in 4.5
divisions (yeah, there is some kind of play-in round). 48*(25+25)=2400 players
needed.
A perusal of one of the four DEL pro hockey leagues (HEL) shows 1919 players on
the player-sort page. This includes minor leaguers. Not sure if it includes
FAs (273) and WWs (136). Let's assume that it does include them. 4 DEL hockey
leagues * 1900 players = 7600 players available.
So, to fill 48 WC teams we would be taking about the top one-third across the
four DEL hockey leagues: 2400/7600.
ECHL has 2022 players on its 58 teams (max is 58*35=2030). Using ECHL plus the
three other phantom college feeder-leagues for the other DEL pro hockey leagues
yields about the same number of players for the DEL World Juniors pool as the
pro league would for their tournament.
I would also suggest that the DEL world juniors include all DEL college players
(i.e., not age-restricted), and that no DEL college players are allowed in the
DEL (pro) World Cup until they turn pro. This is for simplicity, since the RW
juniors have an age cutoff of I think 20.
Also, for those who don't know the tournament format (as I didn't), the various
divisions are set up along the lines of European competitions, with the bottom
finishers in each division getting demoted to the next lower level for the next
tournament, and the top finishers being promoted for the next tournament.
There is also additional bracket complexity at the top level for 3rd-place,
5th-place, etc. BTW, the tournaments appear to be single-game brackets with
basically a round robin format. Wikipedia has a fairly straightforward
explanation for this year's tournament.
Again, for simplicity and ease of programing (hah) I'd suggest we set the
format for the DEL World Juniors and the DEL World Cup to be identical to each
other, or nearly so, and to use the same national teams in each tournament
field.
Thinking about the incentives being mentioned in other threads, I am wondering
if there could be a reward given to coaches for the level they compete at ($$$
in pros, prestige in college) as well as their record in that tournament? No
penalty for demotion, but the rewards are scaled somewhat lower at the lower
divisions so there is an incentive to not blow it off. Not sure how to
initially seed the teams, especially if incentives vary by division: maybe
randomly, and no incentives for the first few tournaments?
I don't know how many individual coaches there are in DEL pro hockey
(individuals, not teams, since individuals can coach more than one pro team).
There are 22 coaches in ECHL, so it should be easy to fill the 40+ national
team slots. My suggestion for choosing teams would be for each coach to rank
order three national teams, if there are ties to allow the coach with either
the most seniority or championships/wins/something to get their pick. Whatever
criterion are used, they should be straightforward and not based on who replies
first.
Anyway, some more food for thought.
Date: Thu Jan 17 18:43:10 2008
Sender: Jay Schlegel
P.S., I grabbed the list of 41/48 teams in the current world cup, so we could
work with that. Who knew Mexico had a national hockey team??
Date: Tue Jan 22 04:14:21 2008
Sender: Dick Butkus
Interesting concept. I like it. 'd be in favor of a newer DEL
Cup to keep up the interest.
When looking at NHL hockey, the real world break down of
nationalities a couple of years ago: 53% Canada, 18% US, Czech 7%...Poland
0.3.
I expect in order to make this work we would not be able to
distribute players evenly across the world. Otherwise
unless you had a top 8 team (Canada, Sweden, US, Czech, Russia..)
you could never actually win. Ireland for instance has a
national team but play the likes of New Zealand and Mongolia
and have no NHL players.
If we distribute nationalities randomly it would not mirror the
real NHL but would give coaches a reasonable chance at winning
some games. I think its a better scenario. The reason is
in the DEL Cup, a coach actually drafts/FAs his team, whereas
in World Cup a coach has no influence as to what his team looks
like as he will be selecting from a pool of players that he has not drafted/FA.
I am also in favor of the seniority aspect of coaching
assignments.
Date: Tue Jan 22 09:32:06 2008
Sender: Jay Schlegel
Yes, I think the DEL talent would have to be evenly distributed somehow across
all of the nationalities to start out. It would still be up to the coach to
pick from among the available players of that nationality to come up with a
team. While the NHL is predominantly filled with Canadian and US citizens, and
it would be a bit of a stretch to see DEL All Star-level talent say on the DEL
Mongolian national team, there are RW professional hockey leagues in other
countries (definitely in Sweden, I think also in Finland, Germany and Russia
from what I remember mentioned during the Olympics), and while these are not
necessarily NHL-level talent overall they are more than capable. The Swedish
national team that won the gold at the Olympics in '06 had a line full of
NHLers (all Red Wings), but the majority of the team were professionals that
played in other leagues in Europe.
THe same can be said of baseball and basketball, where World Cup level
competition and non-North-American professional leagues also exist. The only
complete leap of faith would be for a football world cup, where the rest of the
world plays a different kind of 'football' from North America. But the
tournament format would seem to work well enough for football also.
Date: Tue Jan 22 15:31:25 2008
Sender: Jay Schlegel
I looked into the world-level baseball and basketball tournaments.
The FIBA basketball tournament is long-standing with continental qualifying
tournaments currently consisting of 56 teams (each continental tournament of
course has a slightly different format, and some of these also have regional
sub-tournaments) feeding into a 24-team tournament consisting of a group phase
followed by a single-elimination knockout phase. Presumably we could simplify
this into something like a 64-team tournament, using the group/knockout format.
Or, if there are more than 64 human coaches participating, we can build in an
additional round of regional play-in tournaments.
The world baseball tournament is brand new, was held with just 16 teams, and
also used a group/knockout format. Note that all games are single-games, NOT a
series between two teams. Presumably we could expand this into a tournament
utilizing many more countries.
While I am thinking about it, in the real-world there is of course a
host-nation for such tournaments, and they of course enjoy something of a home
field/court/ice advantage. How could this be handled in DEL? Home-venue
advantage switches among all participants? determined randomly? awarded to
winner? other? Or is this too much of a hassle and should be avoided?
Also, what about how the schedule might mesh with regular DEL events? DEL Cup
runs on the weekends on an 8-week on, 1-week off schedule as I currently
understand it (I haven't been in a DEL pro league in some years). While the
DEL World Cup (pro) could run on a similar schedule, it would seem to me that
the DEL World Juniors (college) ideally would have to run such that it does not
interfere with recruiting in the applicable DEL college league? Or maybe it
doesn't matter since there are the additional DEL phantom college leagues also
feeding players in, so even if one of them is in recruiting the others are not.
Date: Tue Jan 22 23:16:40 2008
Sender: Ken Perry
If this is done, and I think it could be fun, the one thing I'd ask would be
that player nationalities be correlated greatly with player names.
My QB from the just-ended season, P. Munoz, could easily be from a Latino
country; but my TB, W. Gill, if not American should be from some other
English-speaking country.
Of course, if realistic, the concept works worst with American football,
because in real life there are few top players of American football not from
the USA or Canada. I'd be willing to see the game assign a higher proportion
of players than in real life to other countries to make it competitive, but at
the least the country should match the name to some degree.
Other sports have many more players from non-USA countries, all the way to the
other extreme among games on this site with soccer (called football in most of
the world), where the American team should be much weaker than teams of many
other nations.
Date: Wed Jan 23 12:49:03 2008
Sender: Jay Schlegel
Ken raises two issues here, which are not necessarily connected:
names/nationalities and team-talent as a function of real-world nationality
(e.g., America good at baseball but bad at soccer).
I agree about the names, that some effort should be made to distribute names by
nationality. This might be a task that could be done by the coaches initially
to set it up, where a matrix of probabilities could be developed for last names
currently in-use in DEL. There would likely still have to be some random
factor though, so that overall talent distributions don't get drastically
skewed (unless that is what we decide on, see below). Or name/nationality
correlation could be set aside entirely and names/players distributed randomly;
since e.g. a name like Schlegel is clearly German but I am (at least) a
3rd-generation American citizen. We also know that in international
competition that athletes with dual citizenship can end up competing for
countries that they do not train in nor actually even live in.
(Aside: it occurs to me that maybe there could be a dynamic, like
player-demands in DEL-college, where some players who are not selected for a
national team can become unhappy and request a change of nationality for the
following tournament cycle? The team they select should probably be random, or
semi-random at least, since a bidding process would not seem to be very
realistic or maybe I'm naive on this. Perhaps such players with dual
citizenship can be identified at setup, and coaches can somehow bid on these
players as they choose their rosters? Players selected by one of their
possible nations but not the other(s) perhaps end up permanently in that
nation's pool for future tournaments?)
But what about distribution of talent by nationality? If this is done it would
obviously give some coaches a distinct advantage, which IS realistic. If
however we assume that the DEL universe develops players equally across all
countries (which real-world economics, politics and demographics certainly does
not afford) then distributing the players randomly will even the playing
field(s) and allow for a competition where winning will be based much more on
coaching. It would seem to me that a more even playing field mimics the rest
of the current DEL experience (anyone can take any team and build them into a
winner), though there is the precedent of tier/talent distribution in the DEL
college leagues. If we were to do this, how would we decide which countries
are the 'haves' and which are the 'have-nots'? (note: people have been
fighting wars over such issues for ALL of recorded history!) This would not be
easy even for sports which have a broad distribution of world talent, such as
hockey and basketball. Easy enough to say that Canada is a 'have' and Mexico a
'have-not' for hockey, but what about the ones somewhere in the middle, such as
Kazakhstan or Latvia? Perhaps we could use recent world cup finishes to set
the tiers initially? Even so, would there be a way for a team to play itself
from 'have-not' to 'have' (and vice versa!) based upon its performance over the
years?
Date: Thu Jan 24 19:24:45 2008
Sender: Ken Perry
What I was saying with name/nationality would be just to avoid ridiculousness,
like P. Munoz being from Norway or W. Gill being from Japan or something.
I agree with you that it's far from simple to figure real life nation
strengths, but it's something that would have to be done (World Cup/Olympic
competition results are a good source), because The Phillipines having a great
hockey team is something I couldn't buy, for example.
As to who gets to coach what team, maybe success, maybe seniority, maybe the
luck of the draw, or maybe some combination of those would rank the coaches in
a sport, who would then get in that order to choose teams.
Date: Sun Jan 27 14:08:43 2008
Sender: Jay Schlegel
I think the initial country lists should be sport-specific, as you say, to be
as realistic as possible. E.G., the list of nations participating in this
year's World Cup hockey tournament (n=48) does not include the Philippines
(actually, they are not in the most recent basketball world tournament either),
but it does include such non-obvious hockey nations as Mexico, Mongolia,
Israel, and South Africa. This will be a stretch for anyone who views only
US-based primetime Olympics coverage, where non-obvious competitors in any
sport are routinely dropped from the coverage, and certainly these nations have
not been producing NHL-level talent (to my knowledge), but they really are in
the tournament.
I think the ultimate issue will be: how many teams do we need in the
tournament(s) to cover all of the human coaches in the DEL leagues? The hockey
world cup tournament could easily be expanded to include 52 teams (division-0
with the 16 top teams, divisions 1-2 with two groups of 6 each, divisions 3-4
with one group of 6 each) and still follow the current format of
advancement/relegation. For me, the nations that come to mind to add are:
Argentina, Chile, India, Iran (populous/wealthy-enough and/or with at least
some winter weather region). It would be more of a stretch, but we could come
up with 6-12 more countries to fill out a 58- or 64-team bracket. Does anyone
know if we have more than 64 unique human coaches across the DEL hockey
leagues?
The world basketball tournament does NOT follow an advancement/relegation
format, as far as I can tell, though some teams seem to get automatic
qualification (Olympic champion, host nation, etc.). There is a play-in
tournament for each continent (except Oceania) leading to a 24-team final
field. To streamline this, the field could be divided into four regions of 16
teams (n=64, the Americas/Oceania in one region), feeding some number of teams
into the final tournament (n depends on the final format). If more than 64
teams are needed then regional pre-qualifiers could be added for at least three
of the four regions (Asia, Africa, and AMericas/Oceania have plenty of
countries for this, only Europe might run out of countries much beyond n=16).
Again, how many countries would we need?
Baseball would need much expansion, as there are only 16 teams in the current
world tournament. Granted, it has only been played once and will likely be
expanded over time, but clearly we would need more than 16 teams. Football is
totally up in the air, since there is no world football tournament (not for
American football anyway). Maybe we could just grab the country list for world
cup soccer and run with that?
So, either we need to expand the teams/brackets to accomodate every human coach
in each sport (plus some turnover?), or we need to find a way to choose coaches
based on record/seniority just to compete in the tournament in the first place
(as well as for which national team they get to coach).
This is a realism vs playability question. What do YOU think?
Date: Sun Jan 27 15:46:12 2008
Sender: Jay Schlegel
Update re world-level baseball: like basketball, there are various world
tournaments used to qualify teams for the Olympics. Not as extensive as
basketball, since it is not played everywhere, but there are 62 teams which
have some recent history of world-level baseball (e.g., Europe has a two-tiered
tournament comparable to basketball with the 'usual suspects' all competing).
So, a wider tournament is possible for baseball also, using realistic national
teams.
Date: Mon Jan 28 14:52:04 2008
Sender: Jay Schlegel
Can't tell how many human coaches this is, but here is what the current DEL Cup
format tells us:
baseball: 92 teams (from 7 leagues? no EPBL)
football: 156 teams (from 7 leagues? no CCCL)
basketball: 79 teams (from 5 leagues)
hockey: 55 teams (from 4 leagues)
My guess is that a 64-team world cup bracket would easily accomodate hockey,
and probably accomodate basketball (due to a number of coaches having multiple
teams). Not sure about football and baseball since many coaches have multiple
teams (up to 7), maybe 64 teams would be enough?
Date: Wed Jan 30 11:28:19 2008
Sender: Jay Schlegel
Good grief, what did we do before wikipedia?? I've found links which list the
last names from many countries, including the most popular, most according to
recent census figures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_name
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_common_surnames
So while my current-guess is that we would likely have to live with a
randomization of current players across the nations, and its resultant name
discrepancies, we would have a better chance of getting some realism for
names/nationalities generated in the future. At some point I will work on
digesting this list into a table for easier reference.
Date: Wed Jan 30 11:31:03 2008
Sender: Jay Schlegel
Also, here are the wiki links for the upcoming hockey and recent basketball
world cups. These show the brackets (group/knockout structure) as well as the
countries participating.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_IIHF_World_Championship
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_FIBA_World_Championship
Date: Sun Feb 3 16:38:05 2008
Sender: Jay Schlegel
If we want to go with a tier-like structure for talent distribution (for
initial distribution, as a 'reward' for team success over time, or both), and
want to base it on reality, here is how the distribution might look for
basketball based on the current 2007 FIBA rankings. I use this as an
illustration because FIBA theoretically ranks every country in the world and
has a ranking system which we should be able to replicate.
cut=top50
t1 t2 t3 total
europe 16 5 28 49
asia 11 10 23 44
americas 11 0 33 44
africa 10 8 35 53
oceania 2 0 19 21
total 50 23 138 211
cut=top40
t1 t2 t3 total
europe 15 6 28 49
asia 7 14 23 44
americas 11 0 33 44
africa 5 13 35 53
oceania 2 0 19 21
total 40 43 138 211
cut=top30
t1 t2 t3 total
europe 12 9 28 49
asia 4 17 23 44
americas 10 1 33 44
africa 2 16 35 53
oceania 2 0 19 21
total 30 43 138 211
As you can see, it is a bit skewed. FIBA ranks only the top 73 or so teams, as
these are the ones who have accumulated points in their ranking scheme. The
Americas and Oceania have only a few top-ranked teams, the others are all
unranked. Also, the rankings are weighted, with Europe=1 and the others less
than 1 based somehow on quality of competition in each region. At least some
of the unranked teams do not participate in the various tournaments at all, but
my understanding is that all of them *could* participate and so we could build
all of them into DEL World Cup.
Here is the link:
http://www.fiba.com/pages/eng/fc/even/rank/p/openNodeIDs/999/selNodeID/999/rankMen.html
How
this would work in DEL terms is open for debate. The FIBA tournament structure
seems to allow every nation to participate in qualifying tournaments, with the
winners advancing to the continental finals, and those winners moving on to the
world championship. Where teams finish in these tournaments (and the Olympics)
determine their ranking. Similarly, top finishers get a top seed in subsequent
tournaments. Baseball has a similar qualifying-tournament structure. Hockey
has a tier/division structure which divides its have/have-not teams, with teams
moving up/down based upon their performance during the tournament. A tier
structure could be used to weight talent distribution among new players coming
into the DEL leagues (simulating the national zeal and national spending on
sport which comes with winning at the world level).
Date: Wed Feb 6 10:36:50 2008
Sender: Jay Schlegel
Here is a slightly-modified breakdown for 2008 World Cup hockey tournament,
gleaned from the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) website and the
applicable Wiki page. N=64 teams.
TEAM IOC N DIV GRP TIER
Belarus BLR 1 0 A 1
France FRA 1 0 A 1
Sweden SWE 1 0 A 1
Switzerland SUI 1 0 A 1
Canada CAN 1 0 B 1
Latvia LAT 1 0 B 1
Slovenia SLO 1 0 B 1
United States USA 1 0 B 1
Finland FIN 1 0 C 1
Germany GER 1 0 C 1
Norway NOR 1 0 C 1
Slovakia SVK 1 0 C 1
Czech Republic CZE 1 0 D 1
Denmark DEN 1 0 D 1
Italy ITA 1 0 D 1
Russia RUS 1 0 D 1
Austria AUT 1 1 A 2
Great Britain GBR 1 1 A 2
Kazakhstan KAZ 1 1 A 2
Korea KOR 1 1 A 2
Netherlands NED 1 1 A 2
Poland POL 1 1 A 2
Croatia CRO 1 1 B 2
Estonia EST 1 1 B 2
Hungary HUN 1 1 B 2
Japan JPN 1 1 B 2
Lithuania LTU 1 1 B 2
Ukraine UKR 1 1 B 2
Belgium BEL 1 2 A 2
Bulgaria BUL 1 2 A 2
Ireland IRL 1 2 A 2
Israel ISR 1 2 A 2
Romania ROU 1 2 A 2
Serbia SRB 1 2 A 2
Australia AUS 1 2 B 2
China CHN 1 2 B 2
Iceland ISL 1 2 B 2
Mexico MEX 1 2 B 2
New Zealand NZL 1 2 B 2
Spain ESP 1 2 B 2
Armenia ARM 1 3 A 3
DPR Korea PRK 1 3 A 3
Luxembourg LUX 1 3 A 3
Mongolia MGL 1 3 A 3
South Africa RSA 1 3 A 3
Turkey TUR 1 3 A 3
Bosnia and Herzegovina BIH 1 3 B 3
Chinese Taipei TPE 1 3 B 3
Greece GRE 1 3 B 3
Hong Kong HKG 1 3 B 3
Liechtenstein LIE 1 3 B 3
Portugal POR 1 3 B 3
Andorra AND 1 4 A 3
Azerbaijan AZE 1 4 A 3
India IND 1 4 A 3
Malaysia MAS 1 4 A 3
Thailand THA 1 4 A 3
United Arab Emirates UAE 1 4 A 3
Argentina ARG 1 4 B 3
Brazil BRA 1 4 B 3
Macau MAC 1 4 B 3
Macedonia MKD 1 4 B 3
Namibia NAM 1 4 B 3
Singapore SIN 1 4 B 3
So, no Philippines, but Singapore and Hong Kong are close enough eh?
Divisions 0, 1, and 2 are exactly as the IIHF lays them out. Part of Division
3 and all of Division 4 are teams listed as members of the IIHF regardless of
whether they currently field a team (the group designations for these two
divisions were arbitrary chosen by me, though div-3/group-A is mostly how the
IIHF has it).
Since it yields a field of 64 teams, and conveniently a field of five divisions
(16, 12, 12, 12, 12) which fits with the current IIHF advancement/relegation
group/knockout tournament structure perfectly, I think it works well to set it
up this way. The three-tier split here also works well intuitively, with the
top-16 being tier-1 (these are the only teams eligible to win the gold medal
this year), the next two divisions being tier-2 (n=24) and everyone else being
tier-3 (n=24).
FYI: the way the advancement/relegation format works is that one team from each
group in the lower divisions will advance to the next higher division for the
next tournament, and the bottom two teams from each division will be relegated
to the next lower division for the next tournament (I do not know how/if groups
are reseeded for each tournament). So, tier would change over time depending
upon how teams fare in each tournament.
Date: Thu Feb 7 09:48:11 2008
Sender: Jay Schlegel
Another note re the list of hockey national teams above: teams are listed
alphabetically within each group.
For hockey World Cup, each group plays a round robin against everyone in the
same group. For Divisions 1-4, that is the extent of their tournament play (5
games each): the winner of each group is advanced, the last place team is
relegated, ties are broken by goal-differential and total-goals and I think
head-to-head (I forget the order for these). For the top division, it is a bit
more complicated.
For the top division, after the preliminary round of round-robin play, the top
3 teams in each group advance to the qualification round while the bottom team
in each group plays in the relegation round. The four teams in the relegation
round play best-of-three series, AvsD, BvsC, with the two losers being
relegated to division-1 for the following season. The 12 remaining teams in
the qualification round are divided into two 6-team groups (A+D=E, B+C=F).
These then play round-robin games only against the teams they have not played
thus far, with the standings counting the games they previously played against
the other two teams in their group which advanced with them (i.e., 3 new games
+ 2 from before = 5 games count). From this, the top 4 teams advance from each
group to the knockout phase, which is single elimination (play continues
within-group (reseeded 1vs4, 2vs3) until the finals (gold medal game); there is
also a bronze medal game.
So, in the top division teams play a minimum of 5 games (relegatees, max of 6
games) and a max of 9 games (final four), and the lower divisions play 5 games.
Since each game is so important, and there is space in the schedule, we could
add exhibition games against teams in the same division but in the opposite
group to give coaches an opportunity to figure out their line combinations
(e.g., 6 exhibition games for lower divisions, up to 8 exhibtion games for top
division). This could work out to just one DEL World Cup game per team on each
run-day, i.e., Saturdays and Sundays.
The other sports would likely have a few more games per run-day, and/or
fewer/no exhibition games, since their seasons are shorter than hockey is (12
weeks vs 16 weeks) and since there are many more teams to move through
continental qualification rounds (e.g., the FIBA basketball association lists
211 nations, many of whom field a team and all of whom seem to be accounted for
one way or another in the play-in rounds).
Date: Sun Mar 2 21:09:44 2008
Sender: Jay Schlegel
If you are interested in some more details on this topic (more than can easily
be displayed here), email me and I will invite you to a yahoo discussion group.
Date: Mon Mar 10 04:51:27 2008
Sender: Karim Cheaib
wow, jay is on fire :)
Jay, did youi have a chance to talk to andy, and id he is willing to do it?
Date: Mon Mar 10 14:47:12 2008
Sender: Jay Schlegel
Karim, I emailed Andy recently about this but have not heard back from him yet.
If you would like to see the proposal details on the yahoo group, email me at
[no spaces] jay h schlegel [at] earthlink dot net, and I will invite you.
Date: Wed Mar 12 09:41:25 2008
Sender: Jay Schlegel
Some highlights... no Olympics (separate World Cup for pro leagues, World
Juniors for college leagues); Coach Roberto coaches open teams, so all league
players and all national teams are accounted for somewhere; players would be
copied to a new server location for World Cup play (i.e., not using their
regular league record simultaneously, as DEL Cup does), so injuries would not
affect regular league play.
At least that is how I currently envision it. What do YOU think?
Date: Mon Mar 24 10:16:27 2008
Sender: Jay Schlegel
* bump *
If you would like to see the current draft materials, email me at [no spaces]
jay h schlegel at earthlink dot net, and I will invite you to the yahoo group.
If you do not want to see the draft materials, do nothing -- no salesperson
will call... and changes likely will not be made unless there is enough active
interest.
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