The Day Paris Dreads

The day that everyone associated with the Paris Rouge Eiffels fears occurred Saturday. It wasn’t Halloween, nor was it the turning back of clocks an hour, and it certainly wasn’t their 6-2 win in Oslo.

*Mark Stone, Paris*, *saw his OV rating go from 82 to 80 Saturday.*

Websim’s mid-season evolution occurred. There are exceptions, but this is when older players suddenly see their attributes drop and younger players gain a point or two.

Paris is currently tied with Helsinki for the most points in the league, and they have a game in hand over the Jokerits. The concerning part is that there are more rocking chairs and shawls in the Paris locker room than there are weights and treadmills because the average age of the team is 62.8. (The math might be a little wrong. It’s not our strongpoint.)

A review of what just happened shows that Paris actually got lucky this time. More than a dozen of the team’s starters saw their overall rating (OV) drop by a point or more, but only two dropped by 2: John Tavares and Mark Stone. P.K. Subban also dropped by 2 but he has only played in 7 games this season.

The Jokerits’ fifth-leading scorer Eliezer Sherbatov dropped 2 points (which was expected since he played for the Smurfs for six seasons) as happened to three other, lesser-used Helsinki players.

The players with the highest OV ratings who deteriorated 2 points are:

Alexander Aitken, Berlin
Max Domi, Lisbon
Niko Hovinen, London
Jacob Trouba, Copenhagen
Calvin Thurkauf, Tallinn
Mark Stone, Paris
Aleksander Barkov, Dublin
Olli Palola, Lisbon
Vince Dunn, Liverpool

In all, 27 players saw their OV ratings go down 2 points.

*Ivan Ivan, who has 18 points for Zurich this season, improved his OV rating from 72 to 74 on Saturday.*

At the other end of the spectrum, 22 players saw their OVs go up 2 points, including four from Zurich (Justin Hryckowian, Ivan Ivan, Artyom Levshunov and Lennert Markun) and three Minsk Hussars (Janis Voris, Fedor Svechkov and Nick Robertson).

Generally older players get worse at this point of the season and younger players get better. But there are exceptions.

Oldest player to go +2: Klim Kostin, Prague (age 27)
Oldest players to go +1: Tomas Hyka and Andre Burakovsky, Tallin (age 33) and Miks Indrasis, Paris (33)
Oldest player to stay at his current OV level: Michael Del Zotto, Bern (age 39)
Youngest players to go -1: Barrett Hayton, Zurich and K’Andre Miller, Copenhagen (age 26)
Youngest players to go -2: Calvin Thurkauf, Tallinn and Vince Dunn, Liverpool (age 30)

Here is a look at how each team did. The total includes all players (Pro and Farm).