EHM The Blue Line

I've been wondering if there is any possible way of reading the potential of young players you may sign or draft. I know there isn't any attribute reading that will tell you this, but should you use scouts to help you out or what?

uhm yes, like in real life you're supposed to scout the draft and the most important junior leagues. Usually already months before the draft since it takes a while for the scouts to create their reports.

I just notice that sometimes you grab players who seem to be great. Then you have them around for a few seasons and boom, they seem to do nothing for you.

Although their attributes are all through the roof, they just don't do what you want them to do.

I was just wondering about this, thanks.

The key with young prospects is that you have to treat them right in order for them to reach their potential. Just like in real life, there's lots of things that can happen which can stop a player from reaching all of their potential. For example, if they suffer a serious long term injury or they don't play at the right level (e.g. too high or too low a level - playing an 18 year old on the first line of an NHL team is asking a bit too much really).

Yeah...like in a real life, it goes from Joe Thornton to Jason Ward. IMHO, it's helpful to scout most important leagues a number of times using your best scouts (high attributes in player potential, player ability, determination and adaptation). With good determination skills they can give you more information about a player every time he's on their list and to find something new about him.
IMHO, most important are NHL Draft, youth players, AHL, European regions and few lower leagues.
You can also assign you best scouts to an 'intensive' type of search (2-3 month) for most important tasks and let them do it again. Usually, in the spring you get more accurate reports. Personally, I tend to draft players with good determination and a work rate among others, because that increases your chances of getting a quality player in the foreseeable future. However, some players are late bloomers.

I just want to thank all of you for your suggestions and information that you've shared with me.

I can understand that having a few 18 year old kids playing in the NHL on your 1st line is a little much, but I suppose if it is Staal, Crosby, or Ovechkin you are ok.


Anyway, I'll go ahead and take some of these tips and see what I can do. I just want to make my game more interesting, so that I don't get burned out on it in the first 5 seasons or so.

Oh yeah, I also wanted to see if anyone knew how you could easily see attribute changes within the game or would I need to print that player out before the season and then print that player again and compare him from the start to finish?

I read about some people doing that, but I didn't know if maybe there was another way.

Thank you all again, I appreciate it.

JVanderpool wrote:I just notice that sometimes you grab players who seem to be great. Then you have them around for a few seasons and boom, they seem to do nothing for you.

Although their attributes are all through the roof, they just don't do what you want them to do.

I was just wondering about this, thanks.

I was just thinking about this myself. Some people seem to drastically underperform their ratings, while some will similarly overperform.

I can understand the underperforming in those cases where a player with good ratings gets nothing but garbage minutes or is otherwise forced on a role that doesn't suit him. Consistent overperforming is more of a mystery, yet it happens. For example, in my current game no matter who he plays for and who he plays with, Ladislav Smid (not my player) consistently gets 40 points a season with avg. ratings just a notch below 8. Yet when you look at his ratings, he looks like a 3rd-pairing defenseman.

Kekkonen wrote:For example, in my current game no matter who he plays for and who he plays with, Ladislav Smid (not my player) consistently gets 40 points a season with avg. ratings just a notch below 8. Yet when you look at his ratings, he looks like a 3rd-pairing defenseman.

Perhaps his hidden attributes are good. As you might already know, there's a number of player attributes that you can't see in the game - you have to use the pre-game editor to access these attributes.

When you're scouting for the draft, scouting players individually is also a good thing. It means that when one of your scout found an interesting prospect during his search, you can then scout him (using the 'scout' option in his profile), so that other scouts will have a closer look at him. It will give you more details and more sources of information (ie more scouts opinions) about him. The more you scout a player, the more informations you will have about him and the more they will be precise After scouting a player a certain number of times, nearly all the scouts that watched him will told you the exact same thing about him. Then you can be nearly sure you know everything about him

JVanderpool wrote: Oh yeah, I also wanted to see if anyone knew how you could easily see attribute changes within the game or would I need to print that player out before the season and then print that player again and compare him from the start to finish?

I read about some people doing that, but I didn't know if maybe there was another way.

Thank you all again, I appreciate it.

Good question, I don't know of any other way to compare beginning to end of season attributes with players. If anyone else knows how to "view" player progressions please let me know. Printing is a pain and my printer currently does not work so I'm forced to just save the pictures as documents and compare them that way.

While it doesn't show you the actual progression - checking out the practice screen can help you figure out who is improving and who needs a kick in the pants.

Just select view attributes in the practice screen. Green numbers represent a positive change - red a negative.

Thanks for that update CatchUp, I'll check that out and by the way, do games make a big impact on the players attribute change as well?

I mean, you might see that they changed in practice, but will they change because of the games that they play in as well or no?

Just curious...but could this thread be in the player/prospect development sticky thread? No biggie, just wondering. Sounds like there is alot of useful advice in this and it could be merged into a thread that is stickied, where everyone could see it easily.

I agree with you on that!

batdad wrote:Just curious...but could this thread be in the player/prospect development sticky thread? No biggie, just wondering. Sounds like there is alot of useful advice in this and it could be merged into a thread that is stickied, where everyone could see it easily.

I'll leave this as a separate thread for two reasons:

* We can leave the Prospects Thread for discussion of particular players whilst this Potential Thread is kind of a topic unto itself. Also, it'll be easier for users to find and saves us from having a million different threads on the same topic!

* It can get pretty messy merging threads. There's no moderator function to do this; I have to go into the database and manually merge every single post

No sweat, I was just wondering.