NHL 26 Be A Pro Feedback. Great Game, Frustratingly Underdeveloped Career Mode

I want to start by saying that I genuinely love NHL 26. I play it almost daily, I’ve created four different Be A Pro careers, and I think the actual on-ice gameplay is excellent. The play-by-play in particular may be the best I’ve experienced in any sports game.

That’s also why Be A Pro frustrates me so much.

EA already makes other sports games, particularly Madden, that offer substantially deeper and more functional single-player career experiences. NHL 26 has an excellent hockey game underneath Be A Pro, but too many of the systems surrounding the actual games feel shallow, tedious, unfinished, or like they provide the appearance of player agency without actually providing it.

Here are the biggest issues I’ve encountered across four careers:

1. Injury frequency is absurd

I understand injuries are part of hockey and absolutely think they belong in Be A Pro. But across four different created careers, I have experienced at least one significant long-term injury in essentially every season when injuries are enabled.

I cannot seem to simply play through a complete season.

There’s a huge difference between injuries being a realistic risk and long-term injuries feeling inevitable. Turning injuries completely off shouldn’t be the only practical way to consistently experience full seasons.

1. The progression/energy system creates pointless menu busywork

The system requiring energy to allocate toward different areas of player development is fine in concept. The implementation makes no sense.

If I want seven days of energy, I have to manually click Advance Day seven times. If I simply simulate/skip those seven days, I don’t accrue the energy the same way.

Why?

Seven in-game days have passed either way. There is no gameplay, strategy or meaningful decision involved in making the player repeatedly click through individual days. It just discourages using the game’s simulation functions and creates unnecessary menu friction.

If time passes in the career, the associated progression resources should accrue regardless of whether I manually advanced through every individual day.

1. GM interaction and trade requests provide almost no actual player agency

The ability to interact with your GM sounds like a meaningful career feature, but in practice it barely functions as one.

I can request a trade. The GM can say no. And then…that’s basically it. There may be no meaningful opportunity to revisit the request or interact with management about it again for the remainder of the season.

Why include a career-management feature if the player’s involvement can effectively amount to pressing “Request Trade,” receiving “No,” and losing access to the system?

There should be ongoing interaction: follow-up requests, reasons for a denial, discussions about role or ice time, the ability to influence management’s decision, conversations about team direction, or some form of negotiation.

Right now it creates the appearance of player choice without providing meaningful flexibility.

1. The conversation/relationship system feels like a huge missed opportunity

Conversations themselves seem relatively rare and random. Then, when an interesting one finally occurs, potentially valuable responses are frequently locked behind conversation-related traits.

The problem is that trait points are scarce and valuable. Spending them on conversation abilities that appear to have little usefulness outside these rare encounters is difficult to justify compared with improving your actual player.

Even worse, there’s no meaningful way to know beforehand that you’re going to need a particular conversation trait.

You enter a rare interaction, discover that the response you actually want requires an ability you haven’t upgraded, and by then it’s too late to do anything about it.

That’s not really character development because you’re not making an informed choice. You’re guessing beforehand which randomly occurring future conversations might require which traits.

This system could add enormous immersion to Be A Pro. Relationships and conversations with teammates, coaches, management, media, agents, etc. could make it feel like an actual NHL career rather than a sequence of hockey games connected by menus.

Instead, the current implementation makes conversations too infrequent and the progression system surrounding them too opaque for them to accomplish that.

1. The commentary is excellent — but Be A Pro career awareness is bizarrely bad

This one is especially frustrating because NHL 26’s actual play-by-play is outstanding.

But Be A Pro seems to have both reduced the amount of career-specific contextual commentary AND failed to properly track basic career states.

I’m in Year 3 and still hearing commentary referring to my player in rookie terms — making a rookie impact, proving himself, etc.

The game knows I’m in my third season.

There should be MORE contextual commentary as a career progresses: rookie expectations, first goals, milestones, awards, previous seasons, playoff history, records, changing expectations and accomplishments.

EA has already done the difficult part by creating an excellent broadcast/commentary system. Having that system correctly recognize whether my player is a rookie or a third-year NHL player seems like one of the most basic pieces of career-mode customization.

1. Early-career penalties are made worse by contextual control problems around the net

I’m willing to give the penalty system some leeway because Discipline is an attribute that can be improved. A young player with poor Discipline being more penalty-prone makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense is getting penalized because the game misinterprets an obvious attempt to shoot the puck.

During chaotic scrums in front of the goalie — loose puck, rebounds, several players clustered around the crease — the input I’m using to attempt a rebound/quick shot can instead trigger contact/cross-check behavior and result in an interference penalty.

There are situations where I feel more likely to receive an interference penalty while repeatedly trying to shoot a loose puck than I am to actually get a scoring attempt.

That’s not really a Discipline problem. That’s contextual input recognition.

If there’s a loose puck sitting in scoring position and I’m pressing the shot input, the game should prioritize the obvious intent to shoot rather than trigger an illegal-contact animation against somebody standing nearby.

Overall

The frustrating thing is that none of this comes from thinking NHL 26 is a bad game. It’s almost the opposite.

The actual hockey is good enough that I keep playing it constantly.

What I don’t understand is why Be A Pro feels so far behind the single-player career experiences EA already provides in its other sports franchises. Madden demonstrates that EA understands how to build deeper career progression, player agency and contextual career experiences.

Be A Pro doesn’t need to become a giant RPG. It just needs the systems surrounding the hockey to actually matter.

Give us meaningful career choices. Make GM interactions functional. Make conversations consequential rather than random and opaque. Let progression happen without repetitive menu clicking. Track the basic context of our careers. Balance injuries so completing a season is actually possible. And make sure contextual controls understand the difference between trying to shoot a rebound and trying to cross-check somebody.

There’s an excellent hockey game at the center of NHL 26.

I just want the experience of being a pro to receive the same level of attention as the experience of playing hockey.