No matter how much they slow the skaters down there will still always be builds that are the fastest. And the way EASHL has worked for several years now is that speed is king, and so speed remains king.
I think there's ways they could make flat-out speed more balanced:
- It should be trivial to knock the puck away from skaters hustling down the ice with only one hand on their stick. Poke checks, body contact, the boards, etc should cause them to lose the puck. But right now that puck is glued onto their stick as if they're not skating flat out.
- On a similar note, skaters in full-out hustle should have less agility and be easier to knock over or off the puck.
- Make a slight delay between exiting the hustle animation and allowing the player to pass or shoot the puck. Not a huge delay, but there should be something to reflect the time needed to get the second hand on the stick and settle the puck.
- Push stamina reduction even further for players skating at full hustle.
- ( This will never happen, but.... ) Personally, I'd love to see a change back to the NHL 16 days where builds were fixed and all of the skating attributes were the same for all builds. The differentiators were things like shooting for snipers, passing for playmakers, etc. It allowed for defensive or physical builds to be more viable because they could keep up with everyone else. I know this idea is wildly unpopular, but for all the "I want to be able to customize my build my way" talk there just seems to be an endless ocean of min-size, max-speed builds out there.
