Born Leader

They really need to boost the abilities like Born Leader to have a far more immediate and useful impact because your complaint is verifiably valid. If I have a bunch of Born Leaders activated on my team, the entire team should stay pretty well energized the vast majority of the game if every single shot/hit/shot block is adding 10% of energy to the team and/or line. We all can see that isn't the case though so more than likely it needs to be an amazing shot (or amazing save by the opposing goalie I suppose), a hit which forces the player to drop his stick or a shot block when the player is in an actual shot block animation. Anything else like a shove check, a puck that hits your defender in the skate while he is just standing in the way of the shot and not being in the shot block animation or weak shots on goal don't seem to count towards the boost. In theory that makes sense as the game is awful at what counts as a hit so theoretically if you load up on Born Leaders, your team will be near peak energy the entire game which would be it's own unfair advantage.

I only activate Born Leaders on my bigger players who I know will deliver big hits and any card with Truculence. Born Leader and Truculence are very helpful as you will naturally get a lot more massive hits with Truculence activated which activates the Born Leader ability so it's a positive double whammy. 

There shouldn't be any confusion whatsoever on what abilities do, how they impact the game and what limitations they have.