This Week in Hockay: August 16th
Three things happened this week, in this order, and Le Council did not sequence them: a tribunal ruled on who plays where, a fund diluted every team in the league fivefold to pay for what it had already built, and forty-eight cities began playing hockay that has never stopped since.
Here is the week.
The Tribunal Has Ruled
Le Council reported this in full three days ago and will not repeat the whole of it here—the count is the part worth carrying forward. Twenty-four teams filed. Forty-nine offers reached a vote. Sixteen were ratified. Thirty-three were refused. Fifteen trades and one signing survived; the rest did not.
São Paulo Serpents filed four offers of their own and kept all four: defenseman Yarelys González off Havana, winger Omar Hassan off Cairo, winger Sipho Nkosi off Johannesburg, defenseman Denis Baranov off Vladivostok. They also gave up a fifth player without filing for it—winger Thiago Pereira, taken by a Tokyo offer they didn't initiate, with winger Mio Kobayashi coming back the other way.
Tokyo Titans filed three offers of their own and kept all three: goaltender Valtteri Lehtonen and winger Mikko Hämäläinen, both off Helsinki, and that same Thiago Pereira off São Paulo. A fourth player arrived by the same route São Paulo lost one—Rimini filed to pull winger Aoi Yamamoto off Tokyo's roster, and winger Matteo Galli came back to Tokyo in the same trade.
Anchorage Auroras filed nothing that survived, and still lost three players. Johannesburg's shareholders approved two separate filings for Anchorage wingers, Sierra Peters and Cody Tulik; Helsinki's approved a third, for winger Tara Alexie. Three unconnected front offices reached the same conclusion in the same window: whatever they were short on, Anchorage's roster had it.
The loudest objection on the board didn't win. Tokyo's bid for goaltender Valtteri Lehtonen drew 690,200 shares in refusal, split across both teams' electorates—and it stood anyway, because the Tribunal counts a team's refusal against that team's own roll, and 690,200 spread across two rolls never crossed the line on either one alone. Four offers fell to a team's own shareholders before an opponent ever got a vote: Perth on Tereza Horáková, Havana on Manaia Walker, Mumbai on Ahmed Zaki, Ushuaia reaching into the unattached pool for Nils Bergman and being told no by its own room.
The full ledger, every filing, stays up.
Series I Reaches the Register
Three days after the Tribunal closed, the other shoe Le Council had been warned about since June landed. Graine Wetsky Funds exercised Article 3.C of the Series H agreement. Every team's register expanded from one million shares to five million, effective Friday. The proceeds financed twenty-four new teams, a second conference, and the Recovery Assembly—paid for in advance, by fans who did not know they were paying until the notice arrived. Le Council was not consulted and has confirmed it was never entitled to be.
What Le Council did extract: three days without a brokerage fee, and a rule the Funds do not get a vote on. One team may be yours outright. In every other team, thirty-three percent is the ceiling. S.L.U.S.H. now declines any purchase that would carry a citizen past a third of a team that is not the one they've declared, and it has been declining them all week.
Twenty-six of the forty-eight teams already have a citizen sitting at exactly that ceiling, one week after it took effect. Three citizens account for all twenty-six. Le Council did not expect the rule to bind this quickly and reports that it has.
The Citizen in Forty-Eight Buildings
FlargBlarg now holds a position, however small, in every team in the league. Seventy-nine percent of the Anchorage Auroras—the declared favorite, and the one team where the ceiling does not apply. Then, in twenty-five others, exactly 33.00%: Helsinki, Tokyo, Montréal, São Paulo, Havana, Winnipeg, and nineteen more, each stopped at the precise share the rule allows and not one share past it. The remaining twenty-two teams hold smaller stakes, tapering down to six-tenths of one percent of the McMurdo Monoliths. Six hundred and twenty-nine trades since the sixteenth of June. Over twenty-six billion Looneys in buy orders alone.
On Friday, the day the register expanded, FlargBlarg also gave two positions away. Seven hundred fifty thousand shares of the Medellín Mapaches—worth just over four billion Looneys—went to jpvalery, who now holds an even 50.00% of the team outright. Eight hundred twenty thousand shares of the Kyiv Kestrels—worth 1.39 billion—went to andrew, who now holds 51.77% of the Kestrels. Both transfers moved through the Roll of Donations, on the record, the same morning the ceiling took effect. Le Council notes what it looks like without asserting that it is: a citizen who could have contested two more teams choosing instead to cede them to whoever was already building there, and buying twenty-five ceilings elsewhere with the difference.
The Trade for Phuket
FatPenguin is running a similar map with a different center of gravity. Fifty percent of the Phuket Podcasters, declared and unrestricted—2,500,001 shares, the team's new majority. Exactly 33.00% of Tokyo Titans and São Paulo Serpents, at the ceiling in both. And a long shelf sitting at exactly 30.00%—Montréal Maples, Medellín Mapaches, Perth Pyres, and a dozen more—each three points shy of the wall, which Le Council reads as a position still being built rather than one that has stopped.
Phuket is the team to watch in that list, and Le Council notes the date before anything else about it. Eight days ago, Tiinyhandz crossed the majority threshold there, exercised the naming privilege it carries, and renamed the team from the Phuket Parrots to the Phuket Podcasters, on a filing that ran considerably longer than the form requires. Le Council reported it at the time. Tiinyhandz's holdings this week: zero in Perth, zero in Nuuk, zero in every other team the register once showed—and 28.29% of the team whose name they wrote. FatPenguin now holds the room outright, and with it, should FatPenguin choose to use it, the same naming privilege. Le Council has no window into what was said between them, if anything was, and is not aware that anything needs to have been.
Le Council flags one overlap between the two maps rather than two separate ones. Tokyo Titans and São Paulo Serpents each carry both citizens at once—FlargBlarg and FatPenguin, 33.00% apiece, in the same two buildings. Sixty-six percent of each team's register, gone to exactly two people, each stopped at the same wall from opposite directions. Neither citizen holds a majority. Between them, nobody else's vote in either boardroom is close to deciding anything alone.
Season 03 Begins
At 00:00 UTC on the 15th, the wait ended. Panama Pangolins hosted Busan Blizzards at The Lock, first of twenty-four games on the day and the first of one thousand, one hundred and four before a single playoff puck drops. Forty-eight teams, two conferences, a game at the top of every hour, straight through. There is no longer an hour in which Hockay is not being played.
Le Council also corrected, hours before the first puck, something it had published the week before: the wildcard seat is no longer decided by whoever finishes eighth. The seat is drawn—from the field still standing, by a method Le Council has not published and is not certain it fully understands. Finishing eighth will not save a team this year. Finishing ninth will not necessarily cost one.
The First Slate
Twenty-four games, one an hour, from midnight to eleven at night UTC on the 15th. The full recap is on the record.
Nine of the twenty-four broke the pregame line—more than a third of the day—though Le Council notes the line itself had almost nothing to hold onto. Forty-eight teams with no history against each other produce odds that read like a coin landing on its edge; most games opened within a point of even money, and several never moved past 1.9 either way. Nobody had an edge on the first slate of the season because there was, structurally, no edge to have.
The result nobody saw coming had the least to do with odds. Montréal Maples, the league's original team, playing out of The Oldest Rink since the first matchday of Season 01, opened Season 03 with a 1-4 loss to the Winnipeg Wendigos at home. Le Council offers no further characterization. The scoreboard is characterization enough.
The night's individual mark belongs to Talib Al-Amri of the Oman Orcas, who scored three in a 5-4 win over Nairobi that needed overtime and a shootout to settle—Season 03's first hat trick, delivered in the season's first hour. Amsterdam and Tehran combined for eleven goals in a 5-6 Tehran win, the highest-scoring game of the day; Dakar and Cairo weren't far behind at 4-6. At the other end, Vladivostok shut out Zanzibar 1-0, Ushuaia shut out Gander 1-0 in the South Passage's usual register, and Atlantis blanked Prague 3-0 in the Sunken Hall's first-ever game. Tokyo's 2-4 loss to Barbados was the day's roughest—four fights, thirteen penalties called, a building that introduced itself with its gloves off.
Five games needed overtime. Two of those needed a shootout. And across all twenty-four games, on the first night of a season with forty-eight active parishes, The Sixth did not receive a single visitor. Le Council notes this and, per its custom on the subject, offers no theory as to why.
That is the week. A tribunal ruled on forty-nine offers and let sixteen stand. A fund that does not answer to Le Council doubled the register five times over and funded a season with money nobody knew they'd spent. Two citizens spent the week buying the ceiling in a quarter of the league between them, and a third sold nearly everything to keep the one team that still carries the name they gave it. And at midnight on the 15th, forty-eight cities started playing a season that does not stop for forty-six matchdays—Montréal lost its opener at home, Oman got its first hat trick within the hour, and The Sixth, for one night, stayed empty.
Stick around.