A Faceoff Discussion

I've noticed a change in faceoffs with NHL 26 too.

The ref animation has changed from previous years.  There's a bit of an adjustment there to get your timing correct.

But the biggest change seems to be that the importance of counters seems to have been reduced.  Prior to NHL 26 as long as your faceoff rating wasn't significantly worse than the opposing center you could win essentially every draw if you did the correct counter.  In my experience, it was incredibly rare to do the correct counter and lose the faceoff.  In NHL 26 it seems like timing or ping has a much larger impact than previous years.  You'll still win more often than not by doing the correct counter, but you'll now lose at a much higher rate than you used to despite using the correct counter and having good timing.  Anecdotally this seems to happen more against opponents with extremely low ping (  coughQCcough ), but without being able to see the opposing center's ping it's hard to be sure.