Sidebar - while that's a solid game, I wish that someone had been able to re-create some of the realism of Eastside Hockey Manager from back in the day in that game.
I have FHM4 from back in the day and wasn't thrilled with the game. Players and teams tend to be too streaky, there's not enough flexibility with roles you can assign players, stars tended to underperform, and defensive D always tended to score way too many goals and points. Plus players would do terribly when put out of position on the PP which makes no sense (forwards on the point always didn't do much).
Also loved the realism of EHM. Everything, right down to the college teams was actually accurate (although they used fake names and fake league names aka not "NCAA" the stats were real and the fictional players were really modeled after real college players).
I also really don't get the AI in those games. It takes forever to sign free agents, whereas if you offer a guy a one-way contract on the last week of training camp who's not signed and not talking to any other team, he's going to leap at the offer and sign right away, not take a week to decide. Also frustrating because "commissioner mode" won't let you unretire players like Out of the Park Baseball is, which is frustrating when your best player randomly decides to call it quits at 32.
Curious if FHM has gotten that much better in the past few years, but from everything I've read the core issues with the sim engine and interface haven't really changed all that much.
