Scouting and you; the basics

[sten88]

Amazingly in depth and informative thread, my question is far simpler however.

Do you need to scout a player with the same scout more than once? My understanding from FM is that unless it's over a longer length of time so the player's attributes have changed, then there is no point.

Obviously it's a good idea to check out a player using different scouts but pointless doing multiple reports using the same scout.

Would you agree with this, or does a scouts opinion become more accurate the more he watches the player?

In my experience, the more you scout a player then the more of the scout snippets appear. Also, scouting individual players will reveal more of these snippets. In general, I scout the NHL entry draft as well as each of the CHL leagues, then go through the players and assign scouts to individual players that I might be interested in drafting to reveal more snippets like "needs to improve his consistency" which then helps rule out some of players that look very similar.

Also, thanks to those that answered my questions above!

[connormcjesus]

Thanks for the write-up, this is amazing information.

So what do some of the other mental characteristics mean? Like model professional, independent, sporting?

[Shindigs]

Thanks for the write-up, this is amazing information.

So what do some of the other mental characteristics mean? Like model professional, independent, sporting?

Model professional is 20 professionalism. This means they won't ever get that "player showed up late for practice showing a distinct lack of fitness" event. They will also generally respond better to being disciplined for poor performance. Using discipline for poor performance is too powerful in my opinion though. So I've decided to stop using it. It probably does a lot of other stuff too. But it's certainly not vital unless you plan on drafting low determination/work rate players and using discipline to "fix" those mentals.

I haven't checked out independent but I'm like 70% sure it's high Adaptability. So it's good but not something important.

Sporting is probably high sportmanship. No idea what it actually does in practics, and I never saw it pop up more than expected on my best players. So I don't really care about it.

Also I fully agree on multiple scouting of the same player. Sometimes it will take over 20-30 total scoutings of the same player to get all his snippets out. I had a guy in my Seattle save who had been scouted by 10 scouts for 2 years before a single scout noticed he had low consistency. Sadly that was 1 year after I drafted him with my 1st pick that draft. So the more scouts, and the more times they look at him. The merrier. Also keep in mind that every single time a player is scouted it will create a new entry in the Notes & Stats tab of the scout report. These will help you make choices when you have two guys in the same draft with scouts opinions of them ranging between 1st line talent and 3rd line talent. If one of the players have a lot more entries in the Notes & Stats calling him excellent or good. Then that player is much more likely to have higher PA than the other guy. So the more reports the more consistently you can get the right guy. It also helps weed out draft busts, as those guys will generally have nothing but decent/marginal entries until the final scout reports before the draft where suddenly every single report says excellent. Those guys can just be late bloomers, but I consider it a huge red flag when you see that.

Question: I got this dman who posts amazing numbers in the AHL yet his attributes aren't very good at all. I've contemplated bringing him up to the NHL but his attributes worry me. Should I be focusing on his stats or his attributes?

Go for it. I've had 100 CA players get 1 PPG seasons in the NHL. As long as he's got good mentals and quick feet you can get away with some pretty shoddy technical ability. And as long as you give him less than 10 games to prove himself you won't burn a year off his contract either. But put him in a spot to succeed, don't go full Canucks and give him 6 minutes of ice time per game. No one (barring some extreme exceptions) will perform with that IT. Give him the point or half-boards on your PP and see what he can do. In general young players are much too powerful in EHM. So I never err on the side of caution when it comes to if a player is NHL ready or not. If he's got the underlying talent to make it his current CA is almost of no importance.

I should note that lower league scoring doesn't always translate though. Some players score a lot in lower leagues just because they are overskilled for that league, not because they actually got real scoring touch. The opposite is also true where some players won't score at all in the lower levels but really blossom in the NHL. Often it's because the AI's roster management leads to them playing with little ice time and in a system that doesn't suit them at all. When you see a 1 aggression player with almost 1 PIM per game or more in lower leagues you can often assume he's under-performing due to his coach having him play a game that isn't natural to him. It's quite common, especially in players who are playing in lower leagues as juniors.

Edit: Shoutout to Nino for making me waste half my afternoon proving something I already knew:

Turns out you can get a clue of what role value a player has based on their attribute spread. It's not a huge difference and small sample size is small. But when you look at one of the 20/1 guys next to one of the 1/20 guys there are some of the outliers that almost overlap. But they do look distinctly different. Note that I forgot to make one of the centers so I had to load up a new save and count the 20 off 1 def Center:Allround with suffix "four" twice in place of "three" who suffered from a mild case of not existing.

All the Dmen are Defender:Offensive, all the Centers are Center:Allround. They only had height, weight, off role, def role, 100 CA and 100 PA set in the db. The rest was generated by the game. Apparently this game has an issue with short people, as I set all the dmen to be 150cm and they all gained a bunch of height at game start. All the Centers were 200cm but the game did some randomization of the height as well.

Here are the four/fyra (which is Swedish for four) suffix Off D side by side:

As you can see the main difference is in their Pokecheck value. That's the marker to look at when trying to judge the Defensive role of an Offensive Defenceman (which I already knew, because I play this game a lot).

And here are the four/fyra Two-Way C side by side:

And here you can see that Checking, OTP and Wristshot are the three markers to look at when trying to see if it's Off>Def or Def>Off role values with a Center:Allround. Which again isn't news to me. It obviously varies from role to role what the markers are, but once you've seen a fair few of each role it becomes pretty pedestrian to figure out the vague ratio of their role values.

Regarding regens...I've yet to accept that "regen hunting" is still possible; while I see a few people claim they see this specific regen or that specific regen, the TBL Regens thread is extremely quiet viewtopic.php?f=17&t=3605&hilit=regen&start=950 (38 pages with EHM07 over 7 years, or over 5 per year...EHM1 has 1 page over 2 years)

I think it's really unfortunate if regens are easy to pick out still, as changes were made to try to address/fix this, and if they're not working it's to bad that we don't have the information (multiple "proofs") to show Riz

I can give you a step by step guide on how to do it if you like. As well as the way to stop it being possible (or at least widespread). I personally don't regen "hunt" per se. I just use it as another tool in trying to verify how high the PA of a player I already have as one of my possible picks is. I'm still of two minds as to if I consider this cheating or not, but I think it's fun to do the detective work to figure out whose regen it is. So I keep doing it for that reason, at least for now. It doesn't really become a thing until very late in a save anyways. Because it takes so long for most regens worth finding to go back in the pool with how player aging currently works.

Step 1. Check the History tab of the player you want to cross reference. If his first season is 19-20, you know that the only possible players whose regen he could be are ones that retired before mid July of 2019; You also know they retired after mid July of 2018. Because players regenerate at the first possible "regen week" which happens roughly mid/late July every year if memory serves me right.

Step 2. Open up the NHL HoF screen. It has all players' exact date of retirement. This will give you the full list of players that fill the criteria of step 1.

Step 3. Lookup the HoF players' height, weight and handedness over at Eliteprospects. Because players in EHM are at/close to their adult height and weight when drafted this generally limits the possible players down to 1-2.

Step 4. Check what projected role the prospect has. Does it line up with the role you know that player has in the game? It is incredibly rare to have more than 1 possible player from the HoF left at this point.

Step 5. Draft a player whose PA you know is high enough to be a star player for you.

Obviously you still need to do all the normal scouting stuff for these players to make sure their hiddens are up to par. There is absolutely no guarantee that a generational player's regen will also be up to that level. Because PA is such a small part of what makes a good player. I had Carey Price's regen come back with 1 Consistency (on the 1-100 scale) meaning he was useless. Ovi's regen came back with 100 Consistency, but his Pass tendency was too high for a sniper and his adaptability too low for him to really fit in. Add in his loyalty being horrible and him wanting 9M a year for his bridge contract because of it, and I was forced to trade him away. With how reliable projected line is in scouting reports "regen hunting" barely gives you an edge regardless. But especially with goalies it's incredibly powerful since they need so much higher PA than their skater counterparts. Having a goalie who you know will have Holtby's PA the day you draft him is insanely powerful, and a bit cheap.

The part that makes regen hunting possible is the fact that everyone and their mom gets into the HoF and gets into it instantly when they retire. If the HoF only inducted actual HoF caliber players you'd have very few possible regens to hunt for. If the HoF didn't give the date the player was inducted you also couldn't use that to regen hunt. Without this ability to limit the potential field of players you'd have next to no chance to hunt regens properly. If the way player height/weight growth changed so players aren't at their adult weight and height by draft day that would also make it much harder. Also that's more realistic because I can't recall that many players being at their pro match weight when they were drafted as teenagers. Not to mention people far from always have their full adult height at 17/18 years of age.

If any or all of the above changes were made regen hunting would be made a lot less exact, and a heck of a lot harder. Naturally a player could still manually write down when a player retired based on the news item about that, so if you wanted to really make sure you can't regen hunt removing those news items about retirement would probably be the final nail in the coffin for all but the most dedicated of regen hunters. Since they would just shortlist old players and check in on them every few months to figure out when they retire. But I'd be willing to bet most people don't care enough to do that. I sure know I don't.

[philou21]

I've finally took the time to read that wall of text and darn was it usefull. I've put the more important sentences for me in a note pad to help. Especially since the further you get in-game, the further it's hard to spot gems in the draft IMO.

I know Shindigs hasn't been around in a while but I've got a question. At some point for the defenseman you mentionned "Is a strong blueline presence" tells us he's got 10+ in both Defensive Role and Offensive Role" and somewhere else you said for an attacker "that's mainly an issue for a Top 6 Center is that he's got the "purely an attacking player" scout snippet for his role value, the upside of this is that his Offensive role is 17+ which is obviusly great. The issue with that snippet is that it also means that his defensive role value is less than 10". How do you spot a balanced foward? Is there a particular sentence for that in the scout report or you only judge by searching for hints about his decisions + his off. role?

[Primis]

Do you need to scout a player with the same scout more than once? My understanding from FM is that unless it's over a longer length of time so the player's attributes have changed, then there is no point.

Obviously it's a good idea to check out a player using different scouts but pointless doing multiple reports using the same scout.

Would you agree with this, or does a scouts opinion become more accurate the more he watches the player?

A scout will not give you outright false information, by my understanding.

So the more you scout, the more information will be revealed about the player. Not just in the wall-o-text report, but int he overall evaluation.

[philou21]

I did my first draft with that new knowledge and it definitely helped alot. The only con was that the draft was pretty weak and I didn't do enough scouting that year so it will probably be a hit and miss year. Still, most of the players that were on my shortlist I didn't pick them after reading the scouts reports carefully. I went with other players instead.

[mush]

this is ty abott a 3rd rounder i drafted in 2018 ....

[Shindigs]

I've finally took the time to read that wall of text and darn was it usefull. I've put the more important sentences for me in a note pad to help. Especially since the further you get in-game, the further it's hard to spot gems in the draft IMO.

I know Shindigs hasn't been around in a while but I've got a question. At some point for the defenseman you mentionned "Is a strong blueline presence" tells us he's got 10+ in both Defensive Role and Offensive Role" and somewhere else you said for an attacker "that's mainly an issue for a Top 6 Center is that he's got the "purely an attacking player" scout snippet for his role value, the upside of this is that his Offensive role is 17+ which is obviusly great. The issue with that snippet is that it also means that his defensive role value is less than 10". How do you spot a balanced foward? Is there a particular sentence for that in the scout report or you only judge by searching for hints about his decisions + his off. role?

It's right at the start of the scouting snippets parts. Any mention of two-way game. The issue is that the returned snippet is the same for a 10/10 role value guy as it is for a 20/20 role value guy.

That was the issue I was trying to get at with the part about the "purely an attacking player". That snippet tells us the 1-9 in def role and 17-20 in off role. We know he's capable of being a PPG guy as long as he isn't a bust in other areas; But we also know he can't be great defensively, although depending on your system that might not matter much. Essentially a guy with "purely an attacking player" is a "known entity" we know exactly what he can and can't do, so he can't be a pleasant surprise (20/20) but he also can't be a total brick (10/10).

When a guy has "a fantastic two-way player" you can only guess based on his pre-draft point production as to how high his offensive role is, but you know he's got 10+ def role which is enough for a "normal" forward, but if you're looking for a Selke winner you need like 17+ def role and 14+ off role; It is however impossible to scout that a player has those role values as it returns no different values than our brick (10/10) player from before.

When i say impossible I don't actually mean impossible though, rather you can't know with 100% certainty that a player has those role values; But I personally draft with hidden attributes in the preferences turned on. So for me personally it is impossible as I can't see any of the attributes of a player I'm drafting, only his scouting report. But if you don't do that and you know what the attribute spread of a "normal" player of that player's role looks like you can spot the "clues" of a player having his Def role value higher than his Off role value, like that test above I did with two-way forwards. Pokecheck, Checking and Balance were the 3 "identifiers" of a two-way forward with Def>Off. So if you find a player with that in the draft, who is also scouting as being high PA and was able to put up PPG+ numbers in his draft year; Then you can deduce that he's got higher Def value than Off value, and he's got 14+ Off role value as he's a scorer. In the worst case scenario he's a 14/15 which is about Andrew Ladd in the 15-16db role values, but potentially much greater than that. My two Selke farmers were a 14/20 two-way forward and a 14/17 playmaking forwards. The first I knew was incredible defensively, the latter was just dumb luck.

Also remember that if there is no description of a players game at the start as being defensive/offensive/two-way that means you know for a fact his role values are somewhere between 1/11 and 9/15 (or the inverse). Because if a player has a role value of 1/1 through 9/10 the game treats that as a ratio and scales the actual role value numbers to fit with his rolled PA value. And if it's above 9/15 he's either going to be called two-way (10/15) or offensive/defensive (9/16)/(16/9). Now a 9/15 player is still able to be a really good scorer, but since you have no way of know exactly how low it is. You really shouldn't ever draft a guy with no scouted role values. This is sort of an issue as the vast majority of MHL based (Russian) prospects have 7-9/15 as their role values, meaning that unless you're cool with drafting them based on that meta information (which I'm personally not) you can't draft them. Because if they were generated players rather than premade prospects they could be 1/11's and be completely and utterly useless, and I won't draft premade players in a different way than I do generated ones; Because I personally find it silly to do so.

Also the role value cutoffs aren't 100% coherent, as in defensemen and forwards don't have the same cutoffs. I haven't been arsed to find all the exact ones, but the general gist of it is that a defenceman only starts getting the "brings talent to both ends of the ice" two-way snippets once they have 13+ defensive role, rather than 10+. But a defenceman with 10-12 defensive role value still end up being plenty able to handle defensive duties, meaning that just because the game calls a defenceman "very offensive" or something like that it doesn't actually mean they aren't good defensively. But then again you can't really know how high their defensive role value is. You can deduce it based on how high their pokecheck/checking/positioning is, but you can't know for sure.

Finally, the "strong blue-line presence" snippet *should* mean 17+ def role value and low off role value, that's what it means in every single case I've looked it up for science except in the exact player I randomly used for this thread. I still have absolutely no idea why they had that snippet on him. My theory is that maybe Riz mislabeled it on a single type of defenceman role or something. Just be aware that snippet can mean two completely different things.

[philou21]

Thanks and welcome back.

[Shindigs]

Glad to be back. Had some health issues that kept me away from the game a long time, so it feels good to be back.

[philou21]

Glad to be back. Had some health issues that kept me away from the game a long time, so it feels good to be back.

Glad to know you're doing better. I was wondering how you vanished so quickly when you were posting daily.

[archibalduk]

Glad to be back. Had some health issues that kept me away from the game a long time, so it feels good to be back.

Welcome back! Nice to see your scouting thread further updated with more nuggets of information.

I hope you are feeling better. Sorry to hear you have been unwell.

[Primis]

I just wanted to say, it's been slow progress to using it (partially because I wasn't even playing EHM again for a while), but I also have started using this info more and more to help my scouting. The Consistency bit in particular is where everyone should start using the wall o' text. You can look at Determination, and then see what they have to say about Consistency, and it's a very good starting point.

Overall though, it's helped me to better understand the "This guy has good CON and good attributes but just doesn't ever seem to pan out", and avoid them. It's still not perfect because infuriatingly enough you can scout a guy 100 times with the best scouts you have the and the game just simply will NOT ever give you the one last piece of info you want/need.

[Shindigs]

I just wanted to say, it's been slow progress to using it (partially because I wasn't even playing EHM again for a while), but I also have started using this info more and more to help my scouting. The Consistency bit in particular is where everyone should start using the wall o' text. You can look at Determination, and then see what they have to say about Consistency, and it's a very good starting point.

Overall though, it's helped me to better understand the "This guy has good CON and good attributes but just doesn't ever seem to pan out", and avoid them. It's still not perfect because infuriatingly enough you can scout a guy 100 times with the best scouts you have the and the game just simply will NOT ever give you the one last piece of info you want/need.

For sure, and sometimes there are just horrible draft years. And in those years the scouts will give player comparison feedback as if the draft was good. Which means someone who has like 140 PA will be universally scouted as "like Leon Draisaitl/more talented Turris/the second coming of Jesus Christ". It makes being able to spot a dud draft and take those scout reports for what they are a very useful skill. Some players just can't be scouted, which is good because it's like that IRL as well. I have to say scouting is by far the part of the game Riz did the best job on. Even with the extensive knowledge I have there is never such a thing as a 100% safe pick (unless it's a premade player you've seen drafted so many time you know he's got a -9 or -10 in the db based on deductive reasoning). This is only really true when you have no extra players at all generated at launch though, because otherwise the drafts will be so good you get nearly perfect player comparisons due to how stacked the drafts always are in the first few years.

Keep in mind Determinaton and Work Rate have much lower value than you'd think when drafting (especially if your team is a losing one). Because you can just use discipline -> official warning every time a player has a Rating 5 game and that way almost regardless of their starting values they will cap out at 15 in both of them by the time their ELC ends. That's why I Value professionalism above determination/work rate, since as long as your player can handle constructive yelling he will get those up. I also have incidental evidence that disciplining like that can get Pressure up as well. Because I had a player with the "low self-esteem" or w/e the low pressure trait is called, then I yelled at him every time he had a bad game for 2 seasons and the trait was gone. The risk is that they will request a trade if you do it too much. Simply tell the player no and he will forget he wanted to be traded when he goes to RFA and happily resigns with you from FA. That is a bit gamey though, so if you don't want to do that I'd say high Determination and Work rate becomes much more important as you can't really discipline players without huge risk then.

Also I have hidden attributes when I draft, so looking at their determination is somewhat challenging. Currently I've sort of minimalized what I look at in players and put in their notes for each draft to this "string":
(!),Con/nco,Dec/Dec+,Rlx/Mlw,/BG,Pro,SC,Lpre,Lloy/1loy,Lpro/1pro,Ldec,Ply/Sco/2w/Ski(Off/Off+/2w/Def)1-4(Player1,Player2,Player3),L/R,XiY,I/F(AiB)

Legend:
(!) = If a player gets me excited when I read his scout report I will put this at the front. Most common in >100 ranked players who I think might be worth to reach for in earlier rounds.
Con/nco = Consistent/no mention of consistency. With a low low consistency player I will just remove him from the draft entirely by scouting him personally and setting the filter to "Only non scouted", that way I won't even see the low con players in the draft screen.
Dec/Dec+ ,Ldec = I have the list with all 11+ dec and all 14+ dec traits, Dec for the former and Dec+ for the latter. No mention of Dec at all means it's in the blind spot between 11 and I think 6 or 7 for low, haven't checked. If it's low I add the ,Ldec to the end of the "traits" part of my notes.
Rlx/Mlw = Relaxed or Mellow in the traits section. Rlx for 2-6 aggression and Mlw for 1 aggression. Due to its correlation with low PIM and good player performance in my system at least I value this pretty highly.
BG = Big Games attribute of 12+. I don't rate this much as playoff experience will grow it as needed anyways.
Pro, Lpro/1pro = High professionalism; Very useful for being able to discipline up players' Determination/Pressure/Work Rate as mentioned. Very low professionalism (especially when it's actually at 1) Will make developing that player hellish.
SC = Still not 100% sure what Strong Character is, but it's very common on my best players. So I rate it, but not that highly.
Lloy/1loy = Low loyalty may have inverse effect on you player asking for a trade when you discipline him, as well as some correlation to how quick a player will get your team as his favourite team. Which in turn seems to lower wage demands when you resign from RFA.
Ply/Sco/2w/Ski = Playmaker/Goal-Scorer/Two-Way/Skilled; Those are essentially the only 4 player roles I draft for forwards, and being able to tell which a player is from his note is golden.
(Off/Off+/2w/Def) = The snippet about the players role value at the start of his wall of text tell you about this; Very important info to be able to tell from the note when trying to settle on a pick.
1-4 = Projected line in the player comparison portion. Note that a player who is almost exclusively called a 2nd liner isn't a 2nd liner. Your scouts love calling 120-130 PA player 2nd liners, generally a guy who is scouted at 3rd-4th line will have a better shot at 140+ PA than someone entirely scouted as 2nd line. This isn't always true though, just generally is.
(Player1,Player2,Player3) = Players the player comparison is being made to. If your scouts all say 3rd-4th but compare him to 2nd liners, it's a fairly good chance he's a bit of a draft sleeper. Also when in weak draft and the game is giving you BS player comparisons you can generally figure out which players are these Joker comparisons by just seeing which top end players are being compared to way more often than makes sense on prospects who don't seem like much in the mid rounds. It can help avoid picking busts, but it can also make you paranoid and miss out on steals. Down to player preference how aggressive/safe you want to be with your drafting strategy.
L/R = Lefty or righty. Good to know when your team is low on either for the PP or you really need a Righty Playermaker to setup your Lefty Scorer on a certain line.
XiY = something like 32i82 PIMiGAMES. Especially useful when you draft with hidden attributes like I do. Because then this almost the only way to avoid drafting players with high Aggression.
I/F(AiB) = Injury Prone/Fairly Injury Prone (INJURIESiSEASONS) Good way to avoid drafting those guys with 100 injury proneness that just never will live up to expectations as they will often be on the IR when you need them the most. Expect players to have about 1-1.5 injuries per season without raising too much of an eyebrow. More than that, especially on a player who is I/F is a big warning sign. Some players who aren't injury prone at all according to scout will have like 2-3 injuries per season still. I personally avoid them if I can.

Since they are essentially in order of importance this also means that when I sort by notes in the draft screen I get all the consistent players with high Decisions together, which makes getting an overview of potential late round steals quite easy.

[Primis]

Some players just can't be scouted, which is good because it's like that IRL as well. I have to say scouting is by far the part of the game Riz did the best job on. Even with the extensive knowledge I have there is never such a thing as a 100% safe pick (unless it's a premade player you've seen drafted so many time you know he's got a -9 or -10 in the db based on deductive reasoning).

I agree. It drives me nuts when I'm playing a retro database and say my good scouts insist Pavel Datsyuk will never make the NHL regardless of how many times I scout him, but... on the other hand scouting the freeware EHM far, far too easy once you got the trick (even with hidden attributes and such), even if you weren't using utilities to cheat and see POT and CON like so many did. You figure the commercial releases have been out since 2004 though and to my knowledge nobody had/has ever really broken down the scouting text, so even though a lot of us learned certain things through sheer brute force repetition and trial and error, it helps. I love drafting, it's my favorite part of every season cycle. But I don't want to devote time to the draft like I used to in freeware online leagues when I'd compile spreadsheets of player projections for hours on end, just for one draft ( I think I put like 30-some hours into an online draft one time). I don't have time for that in EHM 1 anymore, it already takes long enough to just sim through seasons.

So while I appreciate that sometimes scouts will "miss" no matter what as part of the game, it's still nice to have a better idea why so you can look for possible warning signs and minimize the impact.

I do want to "miss" on guys occasionally though.

[philou21]

I do want to "miss" on guys occasionally though.

This. With all the knowledge I learned recently from Shindigs, I still "skip" some info to actually make mistakes from time to time. Because like Shindigs said, it almost get too easy when you really know how to read scouts reports.

I tend to take chances on injury prone players when I see they have alot of potential or sometime I skip thing like consistency or decisions. I'm trying to take a bit of risk because IRL the draft is basically that.

[CJ]

I do want to "miss" on guys occasionally though.

This. With all the knowledge I learned recently from Shindigs, I still "skip" some info to actually make mistakes from time to time. Because like Shindigs said, it almost get too easy when you really know how to read scouts reports.

I tend to take chances on injury prone players when I see they have alot of potential or sometime I skip thing like consistency or decisions. I'm trying to take a bit of risk because IRL the draft is basically that.

Yeah, I know all attributes and what scouts might say about them. Really bad for us who actually has to dig deep into the game. So I only look at what "Potential stars*" scouts give the players and go from there. So I don't have a clue really what kinda player I'm getting... more realistic that way.

I agree. It drives me nuts when I'm playing a retro database and say my good scouts insist Pavel Datsyuk will never make the NHL regardless of how many times I scout him

Haha, I know (if you mean our 1998 DB). I don't have a clue what's up with that and the reason behind it.

The only reason I find is he's playing in such a bad league with a low reputation compared to his skill?! Just a theory.

[Shindigs]

Some players just seem to get a tag in the db that means they can't be scouted for that draft. It's odd, like you can have two players with every single attribute identical and no matter how many times you redo the draft one of them can be scouted, the other just can't. Ryan Brushett who was the top scorer on the same team as Veleno when in Bantam had a -15 label in the db that never got "fixed" for the longest time, he could never ever be scouted as good no matter how high he rolled. So you could often take a flier on him in the 7th round and about half the time get a top 6 forward. Meanwhile Grigori Denisenko had very similar db values and when he got high PA the scouts instantly put him in the 1st-2nd round.

The funny thing with knowing about what I like to refer to as "enforced busts" aka. players who scout like a top player in every single way when they are actually a complete dud, is that sometimes draft steals who look "too good to be true" look the exact same as those "enforced busts" would. So trying to avoid busts you will quite often pass on steals because of paranoia. So knowing too much actually ends up hurting you a lot of the time too.

I agree on the draft being the most fun part of each cycle Primis. I generally put about as much time into each draft as I do each season. At something like 2-3 hours each depending on how much the draft follows my plan. Sometimes the AI just snipes all the guys you wanted and you end up needing to rethink everything mid-draft, and that eats so much time. But the whole process of getting those notes I use up for every single player in a draft is about a 2-3 hour process, which I split into one 1 hour portion where I only look at player role and consistency to remove all the players I consider entirely "undraftable". Then I normally come back to do the actual trait/potential notes the day after, which is another 1-2 hours depending on how many players remain.

[connormcjesus]

What's the deal with defensive forwards and defensemen? It seems like almost every single one of them have low anticipation and most have low creativity. Is that ok for that role, or should we avoid them?

[philou21]

I dunno about defensive foward but for defensemen anticipation is kinda important. If the guy has really good atts/potential I can overlook low anticipation from time to time though.

[Shindigs]

The roles are just bad. For defensive forwards you want Two-way forwards with good defensive role value.

For defensive defencemen you want either Playmaking/Offensive/Pointman with solid defensive role values (which would return the "brings talent at both ends of the ice" or similar scout snippet at the start of their scout report. The Two-Way Defenceman role is bad, The only borderline acceptable Defensive Defenceman role is the Defensive(Finesse) role, but it's super rare. They give up some Strength, almost all Hitting and some Balance to pick up Acceleration, Speed and Passing/Stickhandling; They also give up most of their Bravery to pick up Anticipation and Creativity*. But both Two-Way and Defensive Defencemen actually get fewer attributes points to work with at the same PA as the other Defenceman roles (I haven't even bothered looking at Enforcer and Stay-at-Home defencemen because they are too garbage to even consider).

A Two-Way forward and a Defensive Forward will have comparable defensive prowess where the Two-Way forward is capable of PPG+ production and you rarely get a Defensive Forward over about 60 points in a good year. EHM greatly favors pretending we're still playing in the free puck era but with new age defencemen, essentially.

0 Grit 100 Skill is pretty much the way you build a great team. Not exactly realistic for the NHL, but that's kind of how hockey is played in Scandinavia so it makes sense that Riz would be coloured by that when he made the game.

*A Defensive(Finesse) Defenceman is still only a poor man's Playmaking Defenceman, so you should probably draft one of those instead.

If you want some more background to why most the Defensive/Physical roles in EHM are bad a large part of it is rooted in the finer details of how Current Ability works; This is the basic breakdown:
Full Cost: Checking, Deflection, Deking, Fighting, Hitting, Off the Puck, Passing, Pokecheck, Positioning, Slapshot, Stickhandling and Wristshot.
Half Cost: Agility, Natural Fitness, Stamina and Strength.
1/5 Cost: Acceleration, Balance, Speed, Anticipation, Bravery, Creativity, Decisions, Leadership, Teamwork and Work Rate.
Free Attributes: Adaptability(Hidden), Aggression, Agitation(Hidden), Ambition(Hidden), Determination, Faceoffs, Important Matches(Hidden), Loyalty(Hidden), Pass Tendency(Hidden), Pressure(Hidden), Professionalism(Hidden), Sportsmanship(Hidden) and Temperament(Hidden).

Role values have no impact on how many points are available (I think they wiki says otherwise, if so it is wrong) but it does change which attributes you get points in to an extent, which makes certain role value ratios more efficient for certain player roles; For instance an Offensive Defenceman with 1 offensive role and 20 defensive role gets fewer total attribute points than one with the opposite role values in practice, since the former gets more points in expensive physical attributes than the latter.

With that in mind, these are the main points to why physical roles are highly inefficient:
1. Physical roles tend towards getting some fighting skill, since players don't fight these points are wasted. This is the first small loss of physical roles vs. non-physical roles.
2. Physical roles pick up Hitting, which is a very weak attributes that's costed at full price. They also pick up tonnes of Deflection (for the "Power Forward" role specifically) which is a dead attribute, I've had 50 goal scorers with 20 Deflection get a single deflection goal in an 82 game season+16 playoff games. This means that your average high PA Power forward generated by the game has wasted 40 attribute points at full value to essentially achieve nothing.
3. Physical roles max out Balance+Stamina+Strength with little to no Acceleration+Agility+Speed, where non-physical roles max out Acceleration+Speed+Stamina with little to no gain in Agility+Balance+Strength; This means that Physical roles max out two half cost and one 1/5th cost attribute while non-physical roles max out one half cost and two 1/5th cost attributes, which means non-physical roles end up with more spare attribute points for mentals and technicals. To add insult to injury Balance and Strength both have low impact on how well a player performs while Acceleration and Speed have large positive impacts on player performance.
4. Finally Physical roles tend towards higher Aggression ratings, which seem to have a correlation with lower Temperament and higher Dirtiness which essentially boils down to them taking a lot more penalties. Since physicality and grit aren't of any real value in EHM this means that higher Aggression=Worse in just about every way that counts.

The end result of the above points is that you end up with a slow player (less likely to draw penalties) who has less points left over for technicals, and then also wastes 40+ of those points in weak attributes (Deflection+Hitting+Fighting) while also being more prone to drawing penalties. Why would you ever want to draft that over a skilled player in EHM? Unless I'm doing a challenge save where I force myself to use physical players I actually completely filter out all physical roles from every draft I do. Because they are a liability, not an asset.

[connormcjesus]

Interesting. I ask mostly because of this guy: https://i.imgur.com/30QTz3b.jpg

He's got solid attributes other than anticipation and creativity. He's a defensive forward, leads the AHL in takeaways with a super small number of giveaways, but has really high PIMs. I'm wondering if I should just trade him away while his value is high or if his play would translate to the NHL level?

[uknownick]

The roles are just bad. For defensive forwards you want Two-way forwards with good defensive role value.

For defensive defencemen you want either Playmaking/Offensive/Pointman with solid defensive role values (which would return the "brings talent at both ends of the ice" or similar scout snippet at the start of their scout report. The Two-Way Defenceman role is bad, The only borderline acceptable Defensive Defenceman role is the Defensive(Finesse) role, but it's super rare. They give up some Strength, almost all Hitting and some Balance to pick up Acceleration, Speed and Passing/Stickhandling; They also give up most of their Bravery to pick up Anticipation and Creativity*. But both Two-Way and Defensive Defencemen actually get fewer attributes points to work with at the same PA as the other Defenceman roles (I haven't even bothered looking at Enforcer and Stay-at-Home defencemen because they are too garbage to even consider).

A Two-Way forward and a Defensive Forward will have comparable defensive prowess where the Two-Way forward is capable of PPG+ production and you rarely get a Defensive Forward over about 60 points in a good year. EHM greatly favors pretending we're still playing in the free puck era but with new age defencemen, essentially.

0 Grit 100 Skill is pretty much the way you build a great team. Not exactly realistic for the NHL, but that's kind of how hockey is played in Scandinavia so it makes sense that Riz would be coloured by that when he made the game.

*A Defensive(Finesse) Defenceman is still only a poor man's Playmaking Defenceman, so you should probably draft one of those instead.

If you want some more background to why most the Defensive/Physical roles in EHM are bad a large part of it is rooted in the finer details of how Current Ability works; This is the basic breakdown:
Full Cost: Checking, Deflection, Deking, Fighting, Hitting, Off the Puck, Passing, Pokecheck, Positioning, Slapshot, Stickhandling and Wristshot.
Half Cost: Agility, Natural Fitness, Stamina and Strength.
1/5 Cost: Acceleration, Balance, Speed, Anticipation, Bravery, Creativity, Decisions, Leadership, Teamwork and Work Rate.
Free Attributes: Adaptability(Hidden), Aggression, Agitation(Hidden), Ambition(Hidden), Determination, Faceoffs, Important Matches(Hidden), Loyalty(Hidden), Pass Tendency(Hidden), Pressure(Hidden), Professionalism(Hidden), Sportsmanship(Hidden) and Temperament(Hidden).

Role values have no impact on how many points are available (I think they wiki says otherwise, if so it is wrong) but it does change which attributes you get points in to an extent, which makes certain role value ratios more efficient for certain player roles; For instance an Offensive Defenceman with 1 offensive role and 20 defensive role gets fewer total attribute points than one with the opposite role values in practice, since the former gets more points in expensive physical attributes than the latter.

With that in mind, these are the main points to why physical roles are highly inefficient:
1. Physical roles tend towards getting some fighting skill, since players don't fight these points are wasted. This is the first small loss of physical roles vs. non-physical roles.
2. Physical roles pick up Hitting, which is a very weak attributes that's costed at full price. They also pick up tonnes of Deflection (for the "Power Forward" role specifically) which is a dead attribute, I've had 50 goal scorers with 20 Deflection get a single deflection goal in an 82 game season+16 playoff games. This means that your average high PA Power forward generated by the game has wasted 40 attribute points at full value to essentially achieve nothing.
3. Physical roles max out Balance+Stamina+Strength with little to no Acceleration+Agility+Speed, where non-physical roles max out Acceleration+Speed+Stamina with little to no gain in Agility+Balance+Strength; This means that Physical roles max out two half cost and one 1/5th cost attribute while non-physical roles max out one half cost and two 1/5th cost attributes, which means non-physical roles end up with more spare attribute points for mentals and technicals. To add insult to injury Balance and Strength both have low impact on how well a player performs while Acceleration and Speed have large positive impacts on player performance.
4. Finally Physical roles tend towards higher Aggression ratings, which seem to have a correlation with lower Temperament and higher Dirtiness which essentially boils down to them taking a lot more penalties. Since physicality and grit aren't of any real value in EHM this means that higher Aggression=Worse in just about every way that counts.

The end result of the above points is that you end up with a slow player (less likely to draw penalties) who has less points left over for technicals, and then also wastes 40+ of those points in weak attributes (Deflection+Hitting+Fighting) while also being more prone to drawing penalties. Why would you ever want to draft that over a skilled player in EHM? Unless I'm doing a challenge save where I force myself to use physical players I actually completely filter out all physical roles from every draft I do. Because they are a liability, not an asset.

Awesome read!

[uknownick]

Interesting. I ask mostly because of this guy: https://i.imgur.com/30QTz3b.jpg

He's got solid attributes other than anticipation and creativity. He's a defensive forward, leads the AHL in takeaways with a super small number of giveaways, but has really high PIMs. I'm wondering if I should just trade him when his value is high or if his play would translate to the NHL level?

I am no expert but personally I will stay away from a player like this unless he got a very high potential and is cheap to acquire. That high PIM and low anticipation (hockey IQ) is a killer for me. Defensively he might cause too many PPs, and offensively he is no threat other than being an "ok" deflection specialist on PP. A Fourth line player based on what he shows in his current ratings.

[Shindigs]

Players with sub 7 anticipation and even more importantly creativity have never worked out at the NHL level for me. A player will generally gain 4-5 points of anticipation and creativity both by the time he's capped out at 30, most of that gain will happen between the ages of 24 and 30 unless you luck out and he's one of those players who gain a lot of his "CA growth" as mentals; Those guys exist but they are quite rare. If he isn't one of those guys he won't hit acceptable ant+cre until he's in his late 20s, and by the looks of things he's a Defensive or Checking forward. Neither is a particularly strong role in EHM so I'd personally just trade him unless you have enough depth that you're fine with keeping him around as a bottom 6 BP specialist, that's essentially the only thing Defensive forwards are good for imo.