You f***ing take that back.
I never did that. I maxed out players that EA made up. Back in the early-mid 2000s before the national teams had any real players or could use anyone real besides NHLers they had made up a bunch of fake players and would shuffle their positions, vitals, and stats around every year or two, but at least left some verisimilitude by having the pbp and arena PA record their names so they would get called out during games. So in order to keep the feeling of having proper, players and not just hearing the audio dance around the names, I would edit those guys and make them into fake rookies.
So my early 00s NHL games included legends like Bulat Idirshev from Kazakhstan, Rob Cane from Great Britain, Stefan Coronel from Ukraine, Ichiro Yoshimura from Japan, Sergei Kapitanov from Belarus (he became my captain, of course
), and Mariusz Marczak from Poland.
Marczak was fun because I didn't even need to edit his stats at all. He was weird case where he was, in a couple versions of the game, a tiny waterbug forward (like 5'9, 170) whose stats were either 50 or 99 and almost nothing else. So he had no shooting power, but perfect accuracy. No checking ability but max speed and agility. No defensive awareness but maxed offensive awareness and stickhandling. So he was a pure offensive machine because most of the 50 ratings weren't that debilitating
I miss those games with those players. It was fun getting the real World Cup rosters, the Euro Elite Leagues, and eventually I think mostly real rosters for all the included national clubs that had no NHLers or consequential players, but I miss all those fictional guys too. It's why I can still remember their names