It was before my time, but the oft quoted six million dollar man t.v. show (with inflation is that 600 million dollar man?) began with "we have the technology we can rebuild him".

The tag line was bigger, faster, stronger.

My plan was to make the hurricanes just that.

After winning it all in season two, I super under preformed in season 3. I made the playoffs by ROW (not a fun place to be) and even though I beat probably the most dominate regular season team in WTP history, I still proved no match for Washington in the East finals.

I had to ask myself why that was. AFter all, going into season 3 I had lost scott gomez and replaced him with J. Stoll. Win Win right? Wrong.

My cup team had two things going for it, Yandle played way above his head and so did by extention Methot. This allowed that other thing to happen. Malkin dominated,...Lemeuix in the early 90's dominated.

Next season, not so much. I had to make a change in a few places. So I did.

AFter again being blessed with not losing anything terribly important, I was able to upgrade a big slow DFD with a young hot shot. The biggest change I made came from two key changes I thought were going to lead me to the promise land.

I traded Callahan for Alzner. Back in the day I traded Benn for Alzner when they were both 70ish. (I know, I know, thank god we didn't keep our teams from the old wtp) This time I know what i'm getting. Carolina sucked at D. I would always be in the top of the league for goals and bottom of the league for goals against. Alzner-yandle gives my team a legit top pairing.

I also managed to get a legit poise freak in tanguay to play on that second line. Point blank, haglin wasn't scoring (no i'm not trading him though)

After swapping a now unnecessary whitney for another playoff preformer in zubrus and moving Brouwer and his 85 poise to the second line I thought for sure I'd be cup champs for season 4.

And I might,.....

But as I hit auto lines, I saw to my horror the CPU took a poop on my lines.

The lines I wanted I set in the edit lines catagory. The pc? this is what they think shoudl happen

Skinner-Malkin-Tanguay
Haglin-Bergeron-Cole
Zubrus-Stoll-Brouwer.


No no no NO!

Some of you guys giggle at how high strung about player type I get. But I feel like I know my stuff. Now Evil does a fantastic job of editing lines as he can, but when they're is a day to day injury the computer is going to do what they want, when they want and there is nothing evil can do about it until the game is over.

Now I may be super wrong, but i'm willing to bet Tanguay playing with malkin doesn't equal another 90 point season for Malkin. I'm also willing to bet in a game 7 in overtime I don't want the PC to randomly change my lines (Cause they do) and have Tanguay and MAlkin pussy foot around for 10 minutes until Skinner eventually gets the puck and shoots harmlessly high and wide.

The point of all this is simple, no matter what we do, no matter who we sign. It is and always has been up to the virtual players and more importantly up to the Ghost in the machine to determine who's going to score 90 and who's going to have his carefully laid chemistry plans blow up in his face.

Fear