Category: Simple Seasons

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Playoff Pre-play: 2023 basketball playoffs

The first spring postseason gets underway tonight–in fact, it’s going on right now–and with it comes a long series of pro playoffs to take us right into summer.

Technically, only the “play-in tournament” starts tonight, which appears to be considered by the league as wholly separate from the main playoff tournament. But for the sake of this post, we’ll call it all the same.

And with this new playoffs comes the first official playoff pre-play in Short Season Games’s short history. This pre-played tournament, which I rolled over the past 24 hours, saw some major upsets, some surprising finishes, an overtime game 7 thriller to upset the 1 seed in the West conference semifinals, and a team coming back from a 3-0 deficit to win in the East Finals. So without further ado, I’d like to present to you how the 2023 pro basketball playoffs shook out in the Simple Seasons Universe.

Play-in Games

East
#7 Miami 117, #8 Atlanta 104 (MIA confirms #7 seed)
#9 Toronto 122, #10 Chicago 115 (TOR advances)
#8 Atlanta 128, #9 Toronto 109 (ATL confirms #8 seed)

West
#8 Minnesota 117, #7 Los Angeles (L) 113 (MIN becomes #7)
#9 New Orleans 114, #10 Oklahoma City 109 (NO advances)
#7 Los Angeles (L) 122, #9 New Orleans 112 (LAL becomes #8)

First Round

East
#8 Atlanta def. #1 Milwaukee, 4-2
#2 Boston def. #7 Miami, 4-0
#6 Brooklyn def. #3 Philadelphia, 4-2
#4 Cleveland def. #5 New York, 4-2

West
#1 Denver def. #8 Los Angeles (L), 4-2
#2 Memphis def. #7 Minnesota, 4-3
#3 Sacramento def. #6 Golden State, 4-2
#4 Phoenix def. #5 Los Angeles (C), 4-3

Conference Semifinals

East
#6 Brooklyn def. #2 Boston, 4-2
#4 Cleveland def. #8 Atlanta, 4-1

West
#4 Phoenix def. #1 Denver, 4-3
#2 Memphis def. #3 Sacramento, 4-3

Conference Finals

East: #6 Brooklyn def. #4 Cleveland, 4-3
West: #2 Memphis def. #4 Phoenix, 4-3

League Finals

Memphis def. Brooklyn, 4-3

See the whole playoffs, including scores, here.

Now to celebrate the fact that basketball playoffs have arrived, not only am I offering 15% off basketball games for the duration of the playoffs, but I’m also introducing a new Playoff Edition of the current season. I’ll explain more in another post, but this will look slightly different than a typical season set.

Also, for every series that Simple Seasons Basketball predicted during this playoffs, I’ll mark everything on the site down 5%. So if I’ve predicted 10 series correctly (just winner, not the series length), I’ll mark things down 50%. Everyone wins!

So for now, use code BBKPLAYOFFS for 15% all basketball items in the store, and enjoy the postseason!

(By the way, men’s pro hockey playoffs are right around the corner! Keep an eye out for another pre-play coming soon.)

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February 22: The first inaugural releases

Welcome back to another new release Wednesday! Today’s theme is “inaugural years.” Some of these I had to stretch a little, but each one of today’s six Simple Seasons is a year one.

Dropping today, we have:

  • 1942-1943 NHL (not technically the NHL’s first year, but the first year it was solely comprised of the Original Six)
  • 1949-1950 NBA (the first year after the merger of the BAA and NBL)
  • 1967-1968 ABA (the first big rival league to emerge for the NBA)
  • 1996 MLS
  • 1997 WNBA
  • 2013 NWSL

Enjoy!

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For those seasons that didn’t quite go as planned

I’ve got a free Simple Season to put out there today, and it’s a new kind of season to add to the collection: interrupted seasons. This tag will be appended to those seasons that didn’t quite go as scheduled; some examples are:

  • Those that had a team drop out midway through the year (1950-1951 NBA)
  • Those that went bankrupt (2019 AAF)
  • Those affected by a lockout/strike (1994 MLB, 1994-1995 NHL)
  • Those affected by COVID (pretty much all of them, right?)

So what makes this different than a standard year? If a bundle has an as-played schedule, the original full schedule will also be included if possible. For some seasons, though, it’s hard to find the actual schedule, so I’ve done my best to create a fictional schedule that adheres to the standards of the time. Sometimes, as in the case of today’s addition (for free! might I add), there’s a planned schedule and an adjusted schedule, and neither of those go the way they were supposed to. The 2020-2021 NWHL (now the PHF) season has all three.

These seasons will great for people interested in the “what if?” aspect of sports replays. What if baseball hadn’t stopped in 1994? What if the Washington Capitols or Baltimore Bullets hadn’t dropped out of the NBA? Now you can find out!

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February 15: New release day #3

For the third Wednesday in a row, there’s another release day for you. This time I’m throwing back to the distant past of 2020-2021: NHL, NBA, WNBA, and MLS (which is just 2021, mind you). Now you can replay the last two seasons of these leagues with Simple Seasons!

Also out today are the first historical modifier sheets, which you can use to pit teams from different seasons against each other. You can find the basketball mod sheets (for men’s, women’s, and mixed games) in both the Free section and the Simple Seasons Basketball section. (Hockey historical mod sheets are TBA.)

Upcoming releases

I’ve got a special free season coming up either later today or tomorrow. Keep an eye out for it!

And coming up next week: historical seasons! Plus the first “rival” league, which I’ll explain in a future post.

Works in progress

Work on my full-play baseball game continues, despite being hampered slightly by a severe overhaul of card design and a moderate overhaul of game mechanics. Since pitchers and catchers are reporting this week, it’s good to have this on the table, even if it requires a few more tweaks! I’m still aiming for a late-March release.

I’m also excited that my first fictional league for Simple Seasons will be ready for release soon. No date in mind yet, but it should be good to go by mid-spring. And if everything goes well, it’ll be part of something bigger–but we’ll see.

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February 8: New release Wednesday

It’s another Wednesday, so here’s another release day! I’ve posted more than I anticipated because I’m thrilled to get Simple Seasons Soccer out the door and into the light. And with it, I’ve made available the 2021-2022 EPL and a bunch of North American leagues: the 2022 MLS, 2022 NWSL, 2022 Canadian Premier League, and the Fall 2022 Apertura portion of the 2022-2023 LigaMX seasons.

Take a look, and hope you enjoy!

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Pre-playing with a working prototype

One of my current projects is to figure out how to adapt football to the Simple Seasons format, which has been trickier than anticipated. Most other sports have a fairly limited range of scores: hockey (typically 0-6), soccer (typically 0-4), even basketball (drop the ones digit and most teams range from 8-12). But football has been tough because of the wide range, plus the different point values assigned to scores.

Now I’ve finally got a working prototype I like, and to test it out, I’ve simulated the upcoming Super Bowl. I started with 10 sims on paper; Kansas City won 6 of them by an average of 9.8 points. And that’s all well and good.

But to really kick things up a notch, I decided to test it on the computer with 5,000 sims. And the results were similar: Kansas City won 50.4% of the matchups in regulation, with 5.1% going to overtime. On average, the score ended up being roughly KC 27, Philadelphia 26, which really isn’t something I’d bet on.

Next up for the future Simple Seasons Football, I need to do some tweaking and work out a full season. But if the score of the game this weekend *does* end up being 27-26, I’ll post the game as-is right then and there.

And stay tuned tomorrow for a different type of football! I’ll be posting Simple Seasons Soccer along with the 2021-2022 EPL and 2022 MLS and NWSL seasons.

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February 2023: New and upcoming releases!

Our first release day!

Short Season Games is celebrating our grand opening with not one but two editions of the Simple Seasons game: Simple Seasons Basketball and Simple Seasons Hockey! I’ve tested and tweaked each of these to make sure they’re good to go, and I’m happy to say they’re ready for their debut.

But you can’t play these games without teams, right? So additionally, I’ll be releasing two of the most recent seasons in each sport: 2021-2022 NHL, 2021-2022 PHF, 2021-2022 NBA, and 2022 WNBA. Create your own history by replaying these exciting seasons!

Simple Seasons is an easy and fun way to simulate anything from a single matchup to an entire season of games. In most cases, all you need is to make two dice rolls, and you’ve got yourself a realistic and believable result between any two teams. This can be a standalone game (which, I can personally attest to, is pretty fun), or you can use it as a supplement for another game (for instance, if you’re playing a season of full games with one team but want to quickly decide the results of all other NPC teams). I’ve tested each sport dozens of times to ensure that results are close to the real thing–but just different enough to make things real interesting!

Upcoming releases

To celebrate the opening of this new store, I’m going to post more games and seasons on a weekly basis. I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep up that pace for the entirety of this project, but might as well come out strong! Currently, the release schedule looks like this:

February 8 – The Simple Seasons Soccer core bundle should be all set to go by next week. Debuting along with it will be the 2022 MLS, 2022 NWSL, and 2021-2022 EPL seasons.

February 15 – This week will see the release of two-year-old seasons in three American sports: 2020-2021 NHL, 2020-2021 NBA, 2021 MLS, and 2021 WNBA.

February 22 – Time to get historical. The last release of February will feature some important seasons in the histories of these sports: 1942-1943 NHL (the first year the league was only the Original Six), 1949-1950 NBA (the first year under that name), 1996 MLS (the first year of our current US soccer pyramid), and 1997 WNBA (the first year for the major American women’s basketball league). And not only that, but I’ll post the first season of the ABA (1967-1968) as well.

March 1 – With what I hope will be Short Season’s first successful month in the books, I’m planning on releasing another sport in the Simple Seasons line, plus two seasons for it–but I’ll keep that sport a secret for now. In addition to those, I’ll also have some foreign (read: non-US) soccer leagues to post, too. As with anything a few weeks out, these are less certain, but I can guarantee at least one!

Of course, this is all subject to change, and it already has once or twice. It just depends what time I have, what information is available, and what sport is interesting me most during any given week.

Works in progress

I’m working on a lot in my spare time and having a blast with it. In the future, I’d like to get a Simple Seasons Baseball game out by the Spring and a Simple Seasons Football game by the summer.

And don’t worry, I plan on offering more than just quick-play games! My baseball long-play game, the one which started this whole idea years ago, should be ready for release around Opening Day (hopefully it’ll be timed perfectly!). Eventually, my basketball game will be ready as well, but I’ve only recently started working on that, so it may be a while. Not to mention, I’d love to branch out of solely sports games someday, but I’ll start with what I know.

So much to look forward to!