[hurricanekevin]

Introducing the World Hockey Union!
Welcome to my fictional 90-team league save starting in 2022. I’m using real-life players mixed with a smattering of historical players to spread some talent around. As the name of the league implies, this is a global league with teams the U.S., Canada, Iceland, Japan, Finland, Germany, England, Korea, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Slovakia, Latvia, Switzerland, Austria, The Netherlands, Czech Republic, and the United Arab Emirates. Most of the teams are US, with Canadian and European divisions. I’ve created all the graphics for the teams and league, but let the game give the clubs default sweaters. In the future, I’d like to create custom uniforms and ice rinks.

Why 90 teams?
Mostly because I love massive leagues; I love the idea of sports, fandom, loyalty, and city pride being spread across as many cities as possible. If FHM had promotion and relegation, I’d add more teams (but maybe make the leagues a bit smaller). I enjoy leagues with a lot of diversity and a lack of dominant teams. It's tough to win anything in a largue league, much less a championship. That helps to prevent one team from dominating.

The Set-Up
There are 80 games divided between the 15 teams in each division. I might have some cross-conference and division games in the future, but I wanted to keep things regional to start. I think I’ve messed up the playoffs for 2022 with only the conference winners qualifying (so 2 out of 90 teams, LOL). I’ll adjust that for the next game year.
No farm teams for now. Might add these in the future, but for now, just main clubs.
I’d like to add some additional competitions as time goes on and give teams more chances to win some trophies.

Problems
Well, to start, there aren’t quite enough players. After the initial draft, most teams only have between 15 and 17 players to dress. There are a lot of free agents, so I’m hoping the clubs pick some up to fill out their rosters.
The AI teams took the best current players during the initial draft, leaving many of the imported NHL greats on the board. I’m curious to see how the greats sort out once they develop a bit. I have to admit I took a bit of advantage of this by picking a lot of the young greats. I suspect I will get hammered for a few seasons but be pretty competitive after that.
The thinness of the initial draft means that many teenagers will be playing for some minutes. This should be fun, but I suspect some mature NHL players might have an absolute field day and be feasting on goals. On the flip side, there is some room for the unsung heroes of the modern game to lead a team in the fantasy world. I’ll be really curious to see how that plays out.
In the maybe a problem but also might be fun chaos department, I’ve added a ton of NHL greats as young players. Meaning Gordie Howe, Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, and Maurice Richard will all be really good at the same time. Once Alexander Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby retire in my save, I’ll add them back as young players (perhaps with a Jr. tag). As I’m typing this I’m thinking I might need to add some more legendary goalies.
I’d like to have some local talent on the non-North American hockey clubs. That might require me to manually add some young free agents or import some domestic greats for these teams.

Still to Work Out
Rivalries. I’ve created a few, but honestly, after setting up 90 teams, 90 team colors and uniform colors, and all the other little things I just wanted to get things going. I’ll add some natural rivalries as they make sense to give the game some more depth but the first season will only have a couple.
Market Sizes and attendances are other things I’m working on. I’ve done many of these, but I’ll continue adjusting as I need to in commissioner mode.
I’ll probably change a few of the teams around; for example, I’ve got a Salt Lake City team called the Danes (after the Great Dane mascot), but it feels a bit weird since I also have a Danish team in the league (Copenhagen Foxes). While I’m not going full role-player with the save, it would be weird to be a team from Denmark playing a team called the Danes from Utah.
Expansion, or the lack thereof: The league is at the maximum size right now so I won’t be able to add expansion teams until the good people at FHM HQ allow larger leagues. I might move some teams around in the future just to mix things up, but I suspect things will stay pretty close to how they are for a decade or so of game years.
I might add some historical players twice with changed names to add enough talent to the pool. I’ll let a few seasons go by before I make a decision on this one.

Conclusion
Over the past few years, I haven’t been able to really connect with an FHM save. I’ve played some “rebuild the Red Wings” saves and some smaller fantasy world games. I’m hoping by sharing this one; I can develop the story lines and my personal affections for players and teams to help build this into a long-term game.
I love pushing and pulling management games to see what they can do. Especially alternate realities that would probably never really work in the real world. I hope to use the sandbox of FHM to create an entertaining experiment.

Next Up
The Entry Draft and an introduction to my club Orlando Indomitable! I’ll have some team spotlights and a full list of the clubs coming up in the future as well.