I feel like this game both under and overestimates the ability of your common NHLer. NHLers have fantastic hand eye coordination, and they tend to be very creative at settling bouncing pucks. Theyre great at keeping pucks in the offensive zone. Generally, if they're in a passing lane, they'll find a way to at least deflect a puck. If a puck is bouncing and they miss it withy their stick, they'll kick it up with their skate.
On the flip side, I can dangle through CPU defenders on all star difficulty with 4th line grinders. Knuckledraggers with hands of stone are making ryan suter look silly. The way I play with line 4 is no different from how I play with line 1. I'm just slightly less successful with them.
In the same vein, all of the player types play pretty similarly. There isn't much noticeable difference between Landeskog and Duchene. Watch them live and the differences are obvious. The high end players strengths should be a little more pronounced, and you should need to tilt your game towards them to be most successful.
Maybe I just need to tinker with the sliders a bit, increase the difference between the good and bad players (though ea should have done this with their rating system). I don't know how to fix the first problem without upping puck control which I think is already too high due to problem B.
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