I'm hyped for NHL 26!

Yes, I am! While most discussions are old complaints and suggestions on how to improve the game/series (nothing wrong with that). I can't help it, I'm really looking forward to NHL 26.

I have had a lot of fun with NHL 25, especially with Franchise Mode. Is it perfect? No! Could I suggest several improvements that would make my experience better? Yes, definitely! But I'm also confident I will have a great time, like most years. My biggest exceptions are NHL 21 and 22, but that is because of a lot of bugs to things that had worked perfectly fine until that point, most of them were related to stats that didn't show correctly during games, but I know there was something else too.

Aaanyway! My overall expectations have gone up slightly from NHL 25 to 26. Ever since NHL started gathering data with NHL Edge, I've wondered when all that data will be brought into the game. In NHL 25 NHL Edge was visible on the boards sometimes, which further made me wonder if it would be coming soon, and here we are now!

I really hope that it will be as good as it has potential to be. The last 4-5 years I've done my own roster files, editing pretty much every NHL and AHL player (spending A LOT of time checking underlying numbers and scouting reports). While the NHL Edge data can't give accurate data on every skill, I do expect it to lessen my editing workload significantly. I guess it is players who haven't played in the NHL enough (or at all yet) will be the ones that needs most work.

But as someone who like to play all games in my Franchise Modes, seeing players with wrong player type or a fast player being slow, because they're not stars, make some players pretty useless. If I've watched a real game and got hyped about someone who's not even a shadow of that in he game, that is annoying. I don't know how the awareness will be handled, but the experience in the past has been that some players get a lot higher defense awareness than they deserve, just to boost the overall. It would certainly hurt the overall of some of the biggest offensive stars overall if they get an honest defensive awareness rating.

Either way, I'm expecting to have to do some work of my own, but less than usual!

Judging by the beta test, the gameplay felt roughly the same (but slightly better) than NHL 25, so I expect to enjoy this year, and I believe and hope I won't be the only one.

Less than a month left! 🤩🥅🏒