Success or Disappointment, What Drives Your Franchise Progress?

With the World Series kicking off tonight, it got me thinking about the crapshoot that is the MLB Postseason. The NHL and MLB are very dissimilar in terms of their structure in many ways, but they’re two major leagues that have a ton of parity in the postseason.

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The Braves, the Dodgers, the Orioles, the Rays are all not playing in the World Series — 100 wins could not save them from their fates. The Boston Bruins finished the regular season last year with 135 points and then lost in the first round of the playoffs. Small sample sizes and so on can do funny things, but it always gets me thinking about video games and how I would react to such situations.

When I’ve had heartbreaking defeats in the postseason or simply flamed out in the regular season, it’s usually pushed me to want to go again, to right the wrong so to speak. Expectations vs. reality is the big thing here, and also it’s just a desire to feel like you were justified in thinking your team was good enough to win.

On the other side of things, when it comes to the Arizona Diamondbacks or Florida Panthers or any other team that got into the playoffs and then turned it up to a whole new, how have you felt during those magical runs? Maybe you thought you were only a year into your rebuild or felt you were still one year away from competing but then went on a run and went way deeper in the postseason or won the whole thing. Does that make continuing the franchise less exciting or more?

For me, early success almost dampens the mood a bit because, again, expectations vs. reality. I went into this situation thinking I would need to do more to build my team up, but now I’m all the sudden on this hot streak or my team produced way faster than I expected. It’s not that success isn’t welcomed, but there is something to the slow build before your team becomes fully formed and dominates.

Winning is always better than losing, but how you win and how you lose I think does matter during these multi-year franchises that many of us love doing each year. Baseball is perhaps a bit of an outlier because finishing just one 162-game season is an accomplishment depending on how you go about it, but the same principles still go into things.

Anyway, just something I was thinking about as the World Series ticks closer, let me know what y’all think!

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