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+---- Thread: *The Honolulu Hahalua vs. The Worst Teams of All Time Pt. 2 (/showthread.php?tid=42886)
*The Honolulu Hahalua vs. The Worst Teams of All Time Pt. 2 - nickyvmlp - 01-14-2023
Special thanks to @MMFLEX, @Starboy, and @infinitempg for agreeing to help with questions I had, leave them a nice tip or something. I don't know how payment works, I just write words and money appears in my bank.
Before I go too far, I just want to clarify, since I realize that some of you reading this are part of these teams right now, or were part of older ones, I just want to let you know that none of this comes from a place of malice. I’m simply trying to understand what’s going on with these teams, and document them for the sake of the history of the league, while also coming up with a few entertaining one-liners here and there. Not trying to hurt anyone with this, I promise. Also, Honolulu won a fucking game, the streak ends at 24. Nova Montagne for President.
Now then, on with the pain.
Part 2: The Dismantling
Starting with Honolulu again, I went to their roster tabs for both Season 37 and Season 38, and found every player that was there for Season 37, and were gone by the start of Season 38, to which I found 14 players. That is way more turnover than you should expect from a team that just went to the playoffs, but it checks out for a team that knows it’s about to bottom out. Then, I went to a few different pages to try to see where those players ended up. In conjunction with the WolfieBot Dashboard, I looked through free agency pages, processed trades, and retirement logs, and found pretty much everything I was looking for. Then all I had to do was find S37’s schedule to piece the dates all together, and voila. A complete summation of the year before their epic collapse. Let us begin.
About a week and a half before Week 1 of Season 37, the first domino fell as DE ILove HotSalads announced his retirement. Also keep in mind, this is just when the retirement posts were made public. The GMs involved with these retirements knew about these a little earlier, maybe even going all the way back to S37’s Draft. On its own, HotSalads’s retirement wasn’t too crazy, especially since he was only in Honolulu for a single season, and only posted a modest six sacks and two forced fumbles in his final season in the league. However, with this roster already being on the older side, the move almost seemed to spark an avalanche of retirement announcements. On the night of Week 1, TE/WR Sal Ami announced that he would hang up his cleats at season’s end. Ami morphed from a consistent short yardage threat to one of the greatest red zone targets the league had ever seen, pulling down 57 touchdowns in just a 5 year stretch. The next day, it was K/P Freddy Bly’s turn. Bly was a solid kicker for Honolulu for several years, but he was an even better punter, ranking second all-time in punts downed inside the 20. Then after Week 10, DT Cade Williams called it a career. Williams was in his third season with the Hahalua, and was well on his way to his most productive season as a defensive linemen, going on to record 14 sacks in his swansong season, with 10 TFLs, both career highs. Then in the last week of the season, Eleven Kendrick-Watts was the next to announce his retirement. EKW spent several productive seasons as the Hahalua’s top receiver, and then transitioned into being a pretty solid safety after the sharp decline to Steven Wadham. And then the next day was the true dagger for the Hahalua. Dexter Zaylren was going to be playing his final games in this postseason. Zaylren had been their starting quarterback for four seasons, three Ultimus trips, two rings, and a borderline Hall of Fame career.
This wasn’t quite the deathknell you might expect, as the team had prepared for this moment with not one, but two quarterbacks selected in the S37 Draft in Nova Montagne and Adrian St. Christmas. So one of them would get called up right away and be forced to start after just 2 seasons in the DSFL. However, most starting quarterbacks get much more time to prep down there, and as a result, Honolulu knew rough times were ahead, especially with the departures of their #1 quarterback, wide receiver, pass rusher, strong safety, specialist, oh and did I mention their top running back was retiring too? I couldn’t find a retirement thread for Buffalo Hunter, but his user already had another player created before the season even started, so let’s just assume that everyone knew beforehand that Hunter was calling it quits soon, especially with the call-up of Bean Delphine Jr. that season. In fact, after talking to Honolulu’s GM about it, I found out the only retirement they weren’t prepared for was Sal Ami’s. Apparently, Sal’s user just took a GM position in Orange County and the two teams couldn’t figure out a trade package for Sal, so he just retired and made a new character.
Anyway, that’s a massive chunk of their contributors lost in one season, all to retirements. Honolulu was an aging team that was at the end of their championship window, and instead of festering in no man’s land, they decided to blow it up, and at least ensure they’d be picking at #1 instead of #4. After the season was over, the Hahalua firmly signaled the end of their championship days, by trading Ray the Manta Ray, David Frank, and Modern Nazgul to the New York Silverbacks for a 1st in Season 38 and George Fantobens, a player who’s still on the Hahalua to this day, and his user probably has no idea, since he had been gone for months, even when the trade happened.
At this point, it was clear to anyone paying attention what Honolulu was doing, and they didn’t want to hold any players hostage that weren’t cool with the prospect of an intense rebuild, and they did their best to accommodate those players. Octavio Perez, their rookie WR, was packaged with an S38 2nd and an S40 4th for an S39 1st and S40 3rd from Berlin. Ioe Torrent, a huge acquisition for them from the prior offseason was dealt to San Jose for an S38 2nd and an S40 4th. And long-time offensive lineman Beniri T’Chawama went to New Orleans for an S40 2nd and 4th.
And then finally on draft night, they traded all the way up to #3 overall to select LB Caleb Hayden. They only had one other pick in that draft, at #39 overall (out of 47 players available), and remarkably, they found another active player, Henry Oswald-Newman. However, both players were kept down in the DSFL for another season. I’m not sure if this was intentional, but doing so would keep active talent off their current roster, and ensure that the team that rolled into Season 38 was as abominable as possible to ensure the top pick in the following draft, which was obviously successful.
Now we move on to Baltimore’s drought, and they didn’t seem to go through a similar raft of retirements before the bottom fell out. Of the 11 players who were on the team for Season 26, but not Season 27, only two were due to retirement, and they were not key contributors. DE Matt Hole and SS Walt Green both hung up their cleats, but neither one were full-time starters anymore. There were a couple of players who moved in the offseason, like Ernest Lover, who after just a single season in Baltimore got flipped to Sarasota, where he had a long, long, and also very long career there, in exchange for a first in S27, a fourth the following season, and a single season of Mike Karpaasi. Dex Kennedy also moved on from Baltimore, and moved into a more pass rusher role in Austin.
But they were also bringing in new talent, almost like a team that was going into the season with some sort of expectations. The front seven saw a massive overhaul with four rookies coming into the fold: LBs Chet Larson and AJ Lucas, and DEs Etrigan T. Slayer and Maui Waialiki, all of whom would spend their entire careers with the Hawks, some longer than others. There was still plenty of talent on both sides of the ball with a good mix of young and veteran talent. However, behind the scenes, things were less than rosy in Baltimore.
According to Starboy (aka Fujiwara), he and Buttersquanch (Joshua Campbell) were ready to step down as GMs, and pass the titles on to a few people within the organization, namely Glims (Felix Archstone) and Frazzle (Annie May). However, the head office wanted them to find someone from outside the organization, as they felt like hiring from within would stagnate an organization that was struggling to break out of mediocrity. Tensions were starting to rise, and they’d soon hit a boiling point in the middle of the season. But more on them in Part 3.
And now for the Yeti’s turn, and where do you even start with this train wreck? Well, let’s start with this. They finished S5 2-12, and didn’t have much room to decline (or so we thought). Only a couple of players left after Season 5, all to retirement. WR Jaquan Young, CB Brice Boggs, and FS Levon Novel all were gone before Season 6 started. But they also had a few major additions. LB AC Hackett signed with them, but he was literally with half the league at one point or another, and they called up a young kicker named Micycle McCormick, who would go on to be a Yeti legend. Not to mention they still had several future Hall of Famers on that team: Carlito Crush, Johnathon Saint, Andre Bly Jr., Boss Tweed, the aforementioned Micycle, and a few of them were actually in their prime. This should be a team that may not be a contender yet, but they should still be someone on the way up. Someone who could be something in a couple of years, right? Right?
There’s unfortunately not a lot to unpack about the Yeti before everything fell apart, because they had been trending in that direction for years. Colorado began life as a championship contender, losing the very first Ultimus to the Outlaws, but then dropped to 3 wins by Season 3, 1 in Season 4, and 2 in Season 5. Word is that management were not as hard-working as you might expect from a general manager. Judging by the fact that they had only won six games in three seasons, I’m not saying I agree with their work ethic, but I could see why someone would give up there. They were already the bottom feeders of the league by the time Season 6 rolled around, and barring a massive free agency haul or the best draft imaginable, they weren’t gonna turn it around overnight.
Next time up, the season’s themselves. Were any of these teams actually close to winning a game or two? Probably, but we’ll examine those games next time on DRAGON BALL Z.
RE: The Honolulu Hahalua vs. The Worst Teams of All Time Pt. 2 - Starboy - 01-15-2023
Seeing some of these old names is making me feel much older in this league. Think I’m one of the only ones to be in one of those bad Yeti teams and the Hawks teams even if my time in Colorado was short
RE: The Honolulu Hahalua vs. The Worst Teams of All Time Pt. 2 - nickyvmlp - 01-16-2023
(01-15-2023, 09:33 AM)Starboy Wrote: Seeing some of these old names is making me feel much older in this league. Think I’m one of the only ones to be in one of those bad Yeti teams and the Hawks teams even if my time in Colorado was shortYou were on the Yeti back then? I had no idea
RE: The Honolulu Hahalua vs. The Worst Teams of All Time Pt. 2 - Starboy - 01-16-2023
(01-16-2023, 05:13 PM)nickyvmlp Wrote:(01-15-2023, 09:33 AM)Starboy Wrote: Seeing some of these old names is making me feel much older in this league. Think I’m one of the only ones to be in one of those bad Yeti teams and the Hawks teams even if my time in Colorado was shortYou were on the Yeti back then? I had no idea
Yeah I was a low earning TE back in S16-S19, Joshua Palmer/Armor King