Welcome to The Figment Hockey News
This will be the home of the Dynasty Report topic covering the latest online league addition to the Figment Universe. What is the
Figment Universe you might ask? It is the creation of the Legendsport, who runs our online leagues and is brought to life through his efforts and those of our great collection of online General Managers.
The Figment Universe is a fictional multi-sport collection of leagues run in a historical environment. By that I mean that all events and people outside of sports are real but everything within sports - specifically the leagues, teams and players are fictional. As I write this we are presently in November of 1946, so Truman is the President, the United Nations is now a reality but facing challenges while World War II has been over for a year. That means thousands of professional athletes, including hundreds of big league ballplayers, who sacrificed from 1 to 4 years of their sporting careers for the war effort have returned home. They will usher in a new golden era of sports and the Figment Universe will reflect that.
We presently have two online leagues: Figment Baseball which contains 16 major league teams divided equally into the Federal and Continental Associations and have just completed the 1946 World Championship Series - a thrilling seven game set beween the New York Stars and Washington Eagles. The sport can trace it's beginnings
back to 1876 when legendsport began his pre-play. At the conclusion of the
1925 season the online portion of the game began with 16 human General Managers, more than half of whom each continue to run a team 22 years later.
Now
hockey is joining in on the fun as a pre-play from 1907 until present day (November 1946) has been completed and the 7 teams of North American Hockey Conference (NAHC) have human General Managers and are about to create Figment history.
Within the next year a professional basketball league, and some point in the coming seasons a professional football, each as an online league with human GM's will be added as well. But that is not to say that football and basketball do not exist in the Figment Universe today. They are already in the 'pre-play' phase and boxing also exists in our universe.
To recap we have the following sports and all are documented in our weekly newsletter -which recently started it's 11th season of regular coverage on a weekly basis. It is in the OOTP dynasty form and will touch on hockey going forward but that report, called
"This Week in Figment Baseball" will just cover the basics of the hockey world. The much more detailed coverage of the online NAHC will be here in the FHM dynasty section.
The sports leagues in the Figment universe are
- The Federally Alligned Baseball Leagues (FABL) comprised of two 8-team leagues called the Federal Association and Continental Association: Always using the current version of OOTP, it is a 16 team major league with full minors that also includes collegiate and high school awards and a collegiate World Championship Series (played outside of the OOTP engine). There is also a rival independent league with human GM's that was formed on the west coast last season as well as a Japanese Foreign League (AI controlled at present) and a Cuban Winter League ran with human GMs.
- The North American Hockey Conference (NAHC)- a 7 team hockey league that has just entered the online phase with a preplay history going back to the early 1900s. FHM9 is the sim that is used for this sport.
- The American Football Association: presently a 10-team pro football league running in the pre-play era played out entirely by our commissioner legendsport with complete league coverage in TWIFB. It will become an online league sometime in the near future. There is also a brand new rival pro loop that just got underway this past fall with 8-teams spread from coast to coast called the Continental Football Conference.
- The American Intercollegiate Athletic Association (AIAA) Football. A college football league simmed out entirely by our commissioner that receives full weekly coverage in TWIFB and feeds players to our pro league.
- AIAA collegiate basketball. A solo play college basketball league using Fastbreak College Basketball that has been around since 1909 and will feed players to the soon to come profesional basketball league.
- The brand new Federal Basketball League is set to start in the next couple of weeks. It is really a rebirth of an old league from the 1920s that folded during the Depression and will be largely centered around the Great Lakes although as it prospers it is sure to see teams spring up in New York and other big eastern cities.
- Professional boxing also exists in our world using the Title Bout Championship Boxing game which used to be released through OOTP developments. There are just three weight classes in our universe to keep things manageable. It exists as a solo project designed to mesh with the rest of the Figment sports universe.
The great thing about these leagues is they do not exist in a vacuum. They all interact together with a believable number of cross-over athletes who play more than one sport such as Del Thomas -the star quarterback for the Boston Americans football team who also spent some time playing baseball for the St Louis Pioneers. There are brother combinations like the Cleaves boys, the Lightbody's or the first family of Figment Sports the Barrell's - a family so famous they have an
entire dynasty thread dedicated to them. There are fathers and son, grandfathers and grandsons both on the playing field and in the owners office and former high school teammates exceling in different sports. Real world events impact our leagues such as WWII as described earlier. Everything outside of sports is real. Our sports world is fictional but based on real events with an emphasis on believability so our teams as of 1945 were east of the Mississippi and based in larger metropolitan centers but westward expansion has happened in rival baseball and football leagues and is destined to occur in FABL and the AFA at some point.
Even the colleges are entirely fictional, but on close inspection if you have a favourite school in the real world you will likely identify a similar one to root for here. The real world gives us Duke and North Carolina -we have the Carolina Poly Cardinals and the North Carolina Tech Techters. They have Michigan and Ohio State. We have the Detroit City College Knights and the Central Ohio Aviators. Our west coast powers presently are Los Angeles based schools Coastal California Dolphins and the City College of Los Angeles (or CCLA) Coyotes. Same for the pro sports where we have the New York Gothams as the team many love to hate in baseball. The Detroit Maroons, Boston Americans and Chicago Wildcats are well known in professional football and hockey gives us the Toronto Dukes and Montreal Valiants.
So I am sure by now you are hooked on following this dynasty, and catching up on multi-sport one linked above a few times on the OOTP boards but your real question is likely "How do I join and become part of all this?"
Just send a private message to
Legendsport on these boards or visit the
Figment Universe website.
We may have an opening or two at the time of this writing in the upstart Great Western Baseball League. Hockey is presently full but there is always room on the waiting list and who knows - if there is enough interest and the timing is right- there is nothing to say a rival WHA-type league could not start up in hockey much earlier than it did in real life or expansion could also come early to the NAHC. And you can keep following the exploits of the league here as the 1945-46 NAHC season is about to begin.