Updated Look at the League I Created When I was a Kid 

So cool to listen to a true legend of the game talk about his career.

I maintain a similar fantasy when I'm by myself on the rink or shooting in the driveway. I'm captain of the Ducks and we've been a dynasty for 300 years, our lives extended indefinitely by incredible cyborg augmentations. The 2nd line is headed by Paul Kariya's twin sons, North and South. We score 28 million goals per game.

This is one of the greatest videos in RU-vid history! This also is what separates you from other channels because who else would make a video like this about their past nerdiness?

Love hearing about this. Poor Hartford! 3 straight SCF losses. No wonder they went to Carolina.

Even in fantasy leagues the Leafs don't win 🤔

Best wishes for a speedy recovery for Yvonne. And the thought of you creating this league back then is incredibly charming and brings a big smile to my face. Thanks for sharing.

We need a Shannon Skanes career video 👌🏻🤩

During the 1989-90 season I remember I had a notebook where I wrote the result of every NHL game that season. I did it because I always wanted to see how each team did against other teams. Now we have internet so I can look back at results from any team versus any team from any season

A Calgary 7 peat. And I thought Tampa 3 peating was annoying.

honestly i've been tempted to get jerseys of characters i've used in the be a pro mode in games. especially ones i've used for multiple seasons. and almost a decade of playing as them

I did a similar thing, but in NHL 17. Created a 9-team women’s league. Played a 40-game season, manually keeping track of stats/standings. Played every single matchup of the season and the playoffs. I even did off-season transactions and started a second season, but never finished it. There was a team that started out very strong, but then collapsed, a couple others that after a good start, went on a long slump and looked out of it, only to make a run at a playoff spot by the end. The final playoff spot was even decided on the very last game of the season. It was very fun.

This was a fun "just for fun" video. You invented fantasy/D&D hockey! (patreon goal for an official rulebook?) I used to do something similar but not as involved with darts, an old nhl teams poster, a mead notebook...and a really pissed off father when the poster finally came down. Thanks for sharing! Brought back good, forgotten memories.

The Hockey Guy Origin Story is a video I wouldn't mind watching...

It’s funny because in 1994 the Blues got swept in the first round by Dallas. But in my head, they won it all too! Let’s go Blues! 1994 Shannon League Cup Champions

So great to hear. I did something very similar with football. Started when I was around 6 and kept it up until I was almost 30 😂 I still have an entire record book I compiled

This is really awesome to see. I’m actually a part of a small community online that is devoted to alternate sports history with people making their own leagues and stories about all sorts of different sports and levels. So to see that this is something that you also did when you were younger is really cool to see.

When I was young I would simulate season after season in NHL I had a whole notebook full of created players and stats.

I remember I tried to do this when I was a kid. I absolutely sucked at it. I tried probably 15 different times and never got past a week into the first season. Eventually, when I was 15, I started one on the computer using a GM site which had a spectator mode so I had no control over any of it. I ended up getting like 800 years into it before I stopped. (I obviously went a little quicker) I have no idea how you managed to spend 20 years doing this just on pen and paper and needing to choose exactly what happened. It's impressive

Hope the surgery went OK and recovery is going well. If you brought it back you could be a team owner or commissioner. ... Was Bettman the commissioner in the fantasy league league too?

This is the content I live for. Absolutely the most entertaining thing I'm gonna watch all day.

This video explains a lot about your obsession with hockey!! Keep up the amazing work sir.

This video explains SO MUCH.... LOL... Most boys have childhood obsessions, thank you for sharing yours. My passion was D&D. Started in 1978 and have been playing ever since. Didn't embrace hockey fully until 1995. (Grew up in Southern California where coverage sucked).

5:41 this is the moment I realize I could listen to ya talk over some b roll footage. Maybe an audio book, similar to what Steve Dangle did, would be something you’d benefit from looking into. I made a team once on the EA game, consisting of the players from around town that I grew up with, stats adjusted and all. Fun times!

So nice of young Shannon to give St. Louis a cup 25 years before it happened in real life.

This is my favorite video you have ever done. Zero snark or irony in that statement, this turned around an otherwise bad day.

Shannon, I used to do this myself in the nineties when I moved to the UK I was bored so I created a 24 team Canadian version of the Premier League. I then used two six sided die to decided the scores of games and get my various winners so I totally get the idea.

I did a similar thing with college football. One weekend I wrote out all the championship games from 1970 to present. I would use that sheet for a couple years to simulate a 30 for 30 documentary in my head about a random year.

I have a program i created to simulate winners of games (randomly), I've gone nearly 30 years into it and, it has evolved into a 60 team two tier league with promotion and relegation. Started it near the beginning of the pandemic and I'm not sure that I'll ever stop doing a season of it every now and them.

This may be the most affirming video I've watched in my 10 years on RU-vid. I used to play a Paralympic sport called Goalball when I was in high school, and organized a couple major regional tournaments for the sport before I dropped out of college. Goalball is the only competitive sport created for athletes who are blind / visually impaired. It combines an offense like dodgeball/bowling with a defense of soccer/hockey. However, because teams are only 3-6 players, and it's primarily only played by blind / visually impaired athletes, the "regular season" is just a 3-4 regional tournaments from January until the end of May, with a National Championship Tournament in June. So in 2016, bored in my college dorm and alone for a three-day weekend, I would up creating a "National Goalball League", that just so happened to have 30 teams in the NHL markets (team names were just the cities, so there was New York and Brooklyn). I never went as far as creating all the players on all the teams, but I did wind up thoroughly constructing how the league would operate, and used RNG to determine all the scores. This allowed for dynasties and parity while also ensuring my market biases were a non-factor. And then I'd keep stats in Excel about it - although in the early seasons I didn't, so when I started around the 60th season, I kept a lot of the records to the Championship series (wins and appearances, matchups, etc). I'd do all the Round Robin & Playoffs on my phone, and then do stats on Excel. Up to season 318 right now, though I never did the Playoffs for 318. Definitely gets harder as you get older with more responsibilities eating at your time. But I'm glad you made this video Shannon. This makes me want to explain my non-sense in a video some day. In 25 minutes though? That'd be a challenge of its own lol

1989, it was Wayne Gretzky Hockey and Bethesda’s Hockey League Simulator that started my passion for hockey in Texas. In 94, my dreams came true.

Hold the phone!! The Flying V isn't just a Mighty Ducks thing?? I love this video! I recognize that joy you're exuding, as I've made up my own league (and worlds) as well. I've always had so much fun inside my own head. Sending vibes for a quick and thorough healing to Yvonne!

I love love love when you talk about this man, so many people do this kind of thing and never bring it up ever, including me

nice! I was looking forward to another mention of this league. I love the idea.

Love this such a great combination of nostalgia and recognition. Just lovely. Best wishes to Yvonne for a speedy recovery.

Most. Incredible. Video. Of. The. Channel !!! I had a smile during your whole story it was so fun, thanks for speaking about these memories

When I was younger I kind of had my own league with hockey cards. I hade different divisions with relegation and promotion. A team had five random players with one goalie. If a player had a higher serial number then the other teams goalie, they scored. Winners moved on and losers end up in a relegation playoffs. The winner of the top division was the champions of the season.

I've done very similar things for AFL (I'm Australian), never thought there were others that did this kinda thing as a kid. Excel spreadsheets instead of paper is basically the only difference 😅

…That was adorable, and relatable too, Shannon! Please upload some of this if you find the old books because going by what you described, I would be fascinated by what you’ve written!

Wow. Just Wow. 👍 Thank you for such a great and fun video! 🙏 Definitely HOF Career!

Your the best Shanon … I made sure to eat h this to the end cause I love to see where your “roots” are. Always been the hockey guy. Or hockey boy at that point

This is great, I remember doing something similar as a kid/young adult. Excellent video Shannon, and best wishes to you and your family!

Love this! I didn't do it with hockey, but MLB, strat-o-matic, APBA...absolutely.

This is the nerdy stuff that I subscribed for. More, please!!!

I remember you talking about this in 2017 or 2018 and I always wanted to see it! This is like waking up and seeing your favourite show getting renewed for a new season!

Absolutely loved this video Shannon, amazing listening to the greatest player of all time talk abt his career

Thank you for sharing your past, great content 🤜🏻 speedy recovery to your wife

Awesome video Shannon!! I got my own league i started in 2018(3 seasons in) and TBL won the cup 3 Times in a row, kinda predicted the back to back that they did haha. U got me inspired to start it again

Now it all starts to make sense...thanks for sharing.

This is honestly so sweet. Not everyone can be in the NHL but we can all dream 🤘

I love this video. I did similar stuff through the late 80's / early 90's with hockey simulators. This brought back a lot of memories.

soooo funny. love the quick jersey changes. thanks.

I love this video. I feel like we have all attempted something like this at some point, but to see it to this extent is super cool!

This is juste amazing!!! Thaks for the sharing :)

LMAO!!! Shannon that was great! I didn't know you started as a Flames fan

This is just amazing! And I can totally see how you thought and planned, I have done similar things in my youth. Not with the dedication as you did, but no one can do anything with the same dedication as you. Awesome video, awesome story! Thank you for sharing! Would also like to see a career video for Bizarro THG from this league, with all your stats!

Honestly all this video has done is make me wanna get a jersey w/ my own name on the back, but it's fascinating to hear the ideas you came up with! It's fantastic to hear the creativity involved :3

Took me back to when I was a kid growing up in the 70s and 80s! Absolutely loved this video Shannon!!!!!

I hope this channel is making you money. You’re a legend Shannon

This was so much fun to watch. Did your 40-team league include a team in Stockholm? Do you have a Blues jersey with your name on it? Shannon's NHL : 12 consecutive Stanley Cups for Canadian teams Real NHL : No Stanley Cups for Canadian teams in 29 years

Great story. Thanks for sharing your experience, this may be helpful for teens to explore their creative side

This reminds of my dad. When he was a kid, him and his friends used to do this same thing, only with bubble hockey league. They would go as far as buying extra players and painting different uniforms and whatnot.

Love this channel you are the reason I want to start doing my own hockey videos only have one up that was the leafs of course losing another game 7 lol but love your channel love the videos buddy

Love the just for fun videos! Thankz again man!

LOL. I'm a bit like you in rooting for underdogs. I was a huge Maple Leafs fan growing up in the late 70s and into the early 90s. Borje Salming was my first favorite player, then later Eddie O, Gary Leeman and Russ Courtnall. There were a few bright moments, but few and far between. Then I moved to Edmonton from 1987 to 1995. Just as the Maple Leafs started getting stronger and the Oilers lost all their stars and started their downslide (around 1994), I switched hard into an Oilers fan. I've been in Los Angeles for 25 years, but still a diehard Oilers fan, and enjoying the playoffs! Keep up the great analysis... I recently stumbled onto your channel, and love it!

Shannon you are my hero this is my life as a kid as well I did it for baseball hockey and football.

Reminds me when I used to play all six sides of a game of Risk... and sometimes cheat for the grey pieces. Don't ask me why

this is amazing, the more we learn about you the more we realize how cool you are.

Love this video. I'm from the UK and when I was in school a friend and I created a football (soccer) league based on the streets around where we lived - we created players, detailed each game, team sheets, scorers etc. Think we ran it until we were in our early teens.

I think I said this in the last vid you did about this but this is just the most wholesome, nerdy, charming Canadian thing ever. I wish you could go back in time and tell that kid where he is and what he's doing now. (Explaining RU-vid to him might be tough but it'd be so worth it!)

Great stuff, can relate a ton to this😅 when normal kids at the kindergarden made drawings of dogs or whatever, I was sketching on diffrent kind of lineups constalletions for the Red Wings. Found a few old notebooks at my attic from that time, so strange to go through today😂. I also remember when I tried to sleep as a kid, counting sheeps wasnt for me, I was just rambling lineups and hockey jersey numbers until my brain finally just got tired enough to sleep. I was totally obsessed as a kid and it kind of just stuck with me to this day. How I picked my random fav team at that age as a 5-6 year old kid from Sweden was basically that my fav color was red at the time, that aswell as the first hockey deck i got had both Sergei Fedorov and Nick Lidström rookie cards, and the rest was history for me and never looked back😅 thank you for this video helped me remember some nostalgia of my own. Keep up the good work🙌

Fun indeed. Thanks for this. I am curious as to how you structured your league and decided outcomes. I suspect I won't be the only one.

Oh man this video was awesome, brings back memories of my own books and stories I made up as a kid. Also makes me realize I really want a jersey with my name on the back lol

Very cool! I thought I was obsessed with hockey when I was young and devoured every word of every Hockey News! I enjoyed making my own players in NHL '94 to '97 on the Sega Genesis. What fun that was!

Petition for a year by year review of THG League

Shannon is brilliant. I love all of this.

I did something similar when I was younger, as well. And then I took all the stats and attempted to write a book when I was in my late teens. Fun times.

Shannon, you are insane and I love it.

Wow! I find this very fascinating! I kinda did the same thing as a kid just not on a NHL level.Very very interesting.

I used to set up my own playoff brackets when I was younger and it was pretty cool to do and I figured out how the brackets were set up from the original nhl hockey game from the Sega genesis I used to have the nordiques the north stars jets whalers win the cup and I'd even write down each game of the final series and like you I lost them over time I'd love to find some of those again

This is so cool and funny and sweet. Thank you for sharing your imagination!

So I'm not the only one who did this...

This is such a cool concept! Difference to me with this and a be a GM mode is that you can always look back to before, how you wrote things, seeing any bias you might not have noticed you had before, all that fun stuff. Thinking about doing a 2000 and beyond version of this so I hope you don't mind me stealing your idea :)

Young Shannon would be so proud. This video just shows that you stuck with what you loved all the way.

7 Straight Cups! What a great league! ;) 🔥. Seems like you had a great imagination for sure!

Excellent vid. I used shoot balls/puck on my net in my backyard and my grandparents barn during spring/summers, simulating games and seasons for players and teams in my head. I wrote down stats for players and teams from past, future and imagination. I know exactly what you meant with that you couldn't give Hartford a cup, I had this rule I commented my own play and it was often one shot per team/player at a time and sometimes you missed the net as your favorite player... game 7 in the finals. Say what you want, atleast it was a great workout since I could go on for hours and hours.

First time I ever played a hockey game was Hockey Manager 2005 for PC, I absolutely loved it, I always managed Chicago because they were terrible, haha! Loved this video good sir. ☺️

You should write a book about this. This is great stuff

Do you have enough info left to try a career video for yourself? Would be a fun offseason/April Fool’s video

"30 for 30 : Superstar Shannon". The question I want to know is, if you had any of the teams you played for retire your jersey number? Calgary must be a possibility. When I was a kid, I had the Avalon Hill boardgame "Paydirt" which came with the 1982 NFL teams, which was the strike shortened season. I played through an entire NFL season, well over 200 games and kept written records of them all. In fact I played it so much, I had to buy another copy because I had worn out some of the components. I did something similar with one of their other games "Superstar Baseball", though for that I created teams and drafted the players, enacted trades and recorded all the games. I still have all the handwritten details in the box to this day. There is something magical about a childhood dedication to something, even something as trivial as a self-created sports league, that you can never really recapture even with all the technology available today.

I absolutely love this. Maybe in the offseason you could recreate the league in an EA game on stream if you get the time

I simultaneously love/hate how this incredibly detailed and storied hockey league ended “because I got a full time girlfriend”

My dad did something similar when he was out of college. He programmed a full simulation of his league in GW BASIC on his microcomputer (I think it was an Apple II?), which would print out seasons on a dot matrix printer. In his case every team and player was fictional, though of course many of the players used the names of his friends and the team locations were places significant to him. He still has the program, and it still works!

I did the same thing but only as the Leafs and I played out games as the goalie shooting on myself in my room.

Shannon. This is literally NHL video games Franchise mode. I suggest you play that if you’re still interested in your own league.

This is awesome! My brother created a bunch of imaginary characters and I would put them on all the professional sports teams in North America and created 15-20 seasons that we would go through as we grew up. This video reminds me of that. I wish I had it all written down!

I remember doing this with NASCAR races (sure there's the games, just my own little fantasy thing like Shannon here). Drew the tracks on a little note pad, name who started/finished where, who wrecked or had other problems, and who won the championship. Fun times

No this is crazy to me. When I was younger I did the same thing except I made every state and Canadian territory a team and there was like 7 rounds of playoffs. The part with the players, trade deadline and draft really just brought back thoughts.

Holy crap! I thought I was the only guy who did this! Seriously. Except I wrote this down in the last few years and I did it on a computer so it was easy to change. Mine was different in that I imagine being born a a few decades older and my 25-year career was between 67 - 92. Since this was still the age of dynasty, I only managed to change 6 Finals: 71: Boston sweeps Montreal (get rid of the 1st vs. 3rd and 2nd vs. 4th seeding. Get Scotty Bowman from St. Louis since he gave the coaching job to Al Arbour right before the season and Sinden had resigned.) 73: Boston beats Montreal in 7. 75: Buffalo beats Flyers in 7 after a 3-0 come back (keep in mind that that season, a New York based team twice came back from down 3-0 against a Pennsylvania based team to force a Game 7. This would be the 3rd). 86: Edmonton beats Montreal in 7. (Roy and Tretiak (who I somehow manage to get from the Soviet Union) are the Conn Smythe Trophy winners.) 88: Pittsburgh beats Edmonton. (Lemieux vs. Gretzky. Gretzky becomes second non-goalie to win Conn Smythe for losing team. Highest scoring Finals ever. I get Lafleur out of retirement, Dionne from Rangers and Tretiak somehow.) 90: Pittsburgh beats Toronto in 7. (The team barely makes the playoffs, wins four consecutive Game 7's including coming back from down 3-0 against Toronto. Harold Ballard dies the day after.) Those are the only 6. In my universe, Orr gets more Cups and in fact, those three: Orr, Gretzky Lemieux, all get exactly 4 Cups and 2 Conn Smythe Trophies. I have way more than this, I actually went into some detail like Shannon but that's all I'll reveal for now. I win more Cups than Shannon but it's also more historically realistic IMHO. Having said that, because I was trying to be as close to being historically accurate as possible, my hometown team, the Canucks, don't win during my playing career. I imagine being an owner and coach after and then winning the Cups then.

So cool to hear the story of this. I did something similar with the Premier League when I was in elementary & middle school in the mid 2000's and had everything on Word docs. Like Shannon, I put myself in the league but as a coach with Chelsea. The 4 years I did this, Chelsea won the Premier League & FA Cup each year, Man United & Arsenal got relegated in year 2 (and never returned for the final 2 years), Portsmouth won the Champions League in year 1 & Wigan won the Champions League in year 3. However the biggest shock of the fantasy Premier League was Bury (out of business in real life RIP) getting promoted to the Premier League in year 3 after being in League 2 in year 1 & qualifying for the Champions League by finishing 3rd the following year. I stopped after 4 years because I got too busy in real life & retired as Chelsea coach.

17:50 Shannon you’re too much 😂