EHM The Blue Line

I've been running some test games with the 1998 DB and using DET as a guineau pig. I've started 3 different games now, and no matter what I do, when I have DET's scouts individually scout Pavel Datsyuk, they NEVER see him as more than a 4th liner, and often less. So I poked around, and in all 3 games his attributes are fine and PA is still good, as is his Consistency of course. Similarly, without fail after camp Scotty Bowman always mentions that he's not good enough and we shouldn't be bothering with him.

When the scout reports come back, in the news it's always the "limited potential, unlikely to improve your roster" story, with occasional scattered "could add some depth".

Scouts compare him to Steve Yzerman fairly often (sometimes as a slower Steve Yzerman). I've also seen Adam Oates and Craig Jenny (which is a bit odd of one, but ok) quite a bit. Yet at the same time, there's a weird disconnect then where they just don't project him beyond being a 4th liner, even though they're comparing him to these other players.

The scouts I've used include Hakkan Andersson and Mark Howe, who have good enough scouting attributes that they shouldn't "miss" constantly with repeated scouting. So it should not be an issue of naff scouts.

I can't find anything having to do with the player himself, nor with the scouts.

Can anyone explain what is happening here, and why scouting and re-scouting him always yields this very same conflicting feedback? It's obviously not true in every facet, because he then is always shown as DET's top prospect in the Team Report screen, which means he's being highly valued *somewhere* within the game, and Jim NiIl at least can evaluate it.

(I'm not highlighting the 1998 DB in particular or anything. It just happens to the be the DB I'm fiddling around in.)

In my save. I'm going to start the 2000/2001 season. They still have Datsyuk in Russia but his stats has improved a lot (since the start of 1998 season) and I'd say he's a good 3rd or 2nd liner in NHL already... but still he plays in Russia.

I was thinking back, and I know I've run into this in modern databases as well playing as Arizona before with Anthony Duclair, where no matter what I (or he) did my scouts never thought he was worth anything, but still were comparing him to good players anyways. Even once I had him in the NHL lineup and he was scoring decently and won the Calder, they still insisted he was just not good enough for the NHL, no matter how many times I told them to re-scout him.

Primis wrote: I can't find anything having to do with the player himself, nor with the scouts.

Do you think if you had scouted him as Florida or Tampa Bay the recommendations might have been better? I haven't played the 1998 dB but if it's close to real life at all then Datsyuk wouldn't be even close to Red Wing quality back then but maybe a bad team could have used him. Are statistics used to generate scout reports? His production in Russia prior to the 1998 draft wasn't impressive at all.