Reading into producers Sean Ramjagsingh's and Andy Agostini's statements on why GM Connected wasn't included in the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of NHL 15 or NHL 16, the underlying message coming out of EA Canada seems to be, You (the fans) asked for it. We (the developers) built it. But you didn't play it. So we axed it.

GM Connected first appeared in NHL 13 on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Although that year's attempt at "online franchise" contained many obvious flaws, Electronic Arts never made any notable improvements to the mode in subsequent seasons. The GM Connected you could play in NHL 13 was pretty much the same GM Connected that you can play right now in NHL 15, if you still own a console from the previous generation. It's as if EA saw their child emerge from the womb with multiple birth defects, brought her back home from the hospital, locked her in their basement for a few years, and then tried explaining with a straight face that she died of natural causes, when a neighbor asked them "How's little Connie doing these days?" at a town meeting.

If EA truly wanted to "work with our fans to better understand their needs and expectations on what a great online dynasty for the new generation of consoles should deliver and where we fell short on GM Connected," all they had to do was check their company's own forums, or the Operation Sports forums, any time in the past three years. Plenty of unsatisfied customers were there, discussing GM Connected's problems (and how to solve them), from the day the mode went live. I don't believe for a second that EA didn't know how to make the mode better. I believe that they simply chose not to make it better. Probably, because they couldn't see a payoff in making it any better.

If EA ever wants to bring it back to life, here's what GM Connected will need to survive on current-gen:

"We understand that that there were some issues with the overall speed of the mode."

This is a massive understatement, akin to saying, "Edmonton's recent draft picks just haven't panned out for them," or "Toronto's defense just hasn't played up to its expectations."

The speed of GM Connected -- specifically, its slow loading times between menus and mandatory 82-game season length -- was the primary reason for the feature's failure.

If you turn on your Xbox 360 today, and try to play GM Connected in NHL 15, it will still take you between 5 to 20 seconds just to move from one menu to the next in EA's text-heavy maze of torment. That's unacceptable, especially in a mode where half the fun is supposed to come from managing your roster. I always just resigned myself to letting the computer set up everything for my team, because navigating GM Connected was such a nuisance.

"Very few leagues made it past the 20-game mark of season 1."

NHL 2K5 solved this problem, way back on the original Xbox, by offering multiple options for season length in its online leagues. Yet NHL 13, NHL 14, and NHL 15 all shipped with 82-game regular seasons as the only choice. How did this mistake happen, 3 years in a row? Did EA not hear their fans' pleas? Or did they just put all that noise on mute, and keep plugging away at more Ultimate Team content?

Shorter season lengths help to reduce owner churn and keep online leagues healthy. You won't meet many people online who have the heart of the Ottawa Senators, and will continue playing if they're 15 points out of a playoff spot with 2 months remaining on their schedule. Most users will just drop out of the league, and go find another group where they can win more easily, rather than wait for another 40 games to pass before the draft and free agency finally arrive. And at that point, finding a replacement owner to take over a hopeless team that's had most of its familiar players traded or cut is going to be pretty tough.

Why wasn't the NHL entry draft live?

If your GM Connected group miraculously made it to the off-season, you'd discover that the drafting process in this mode was disappointingly automated. Owners could prioritize their favorite rookies on a pre-draft scouting board, but the actual event was simulated off-screen.

Madden NFL 10's online franchise mode figured out how to make a live, 32-owner rookie draft work, yet somehow, EA couldn't reproduce their own feature, three years later, on the exact same hardware.

"Only a very small number of leagues had more than two players per league."

This is going to be true of any online sports mode, because people generally prefer to compete against their friends, instead of against strangers or acquaintances. I'd imagine that the number of EASHL teams with more than two or three regular players is also very small, for that same reason. I don't view this as a downside, but rather, a reality of how people like to play sports games online. The only true negatives here are EA's server expenses, which I'd assume would increase if there are lots of two-person leagues to maintain, and decrease when there are fewer leagues with larger populations. There's also a good chance that EA wasted a lot of their development time and manpower getting NHL 13's gratuitously large, 25-member teams working in GM Connected, when only a handful of leagues actually played with more than one member per team.

Why couldn't commissioners create a single set of custom gameplay sliders for the entire league?

GM Connected supported user-made gameplay sliders, but it did so in a strange, badly designed way. A league's commissioner could not choose one set of gameplay sliders, and automatically enforce them upon every game that was played. Instead, the host of each game session got to pick the sliders that would be used on the pre-match screen. So if the host selected "custom," there was no way of telling if his sliders were league-approved, or if they were rigged in the host's favor. As a result, most leagues had to settle on using the default sliders and game styles, since those could at least be easily regulated. But if you take your video game hockey seriously enough to sign up for a virtual league, then you're probably the type of person who's bothered by how unrealistically EA's NHL titles tend to play on default settings.

Not enough injuries happening outside of simmed games

The NFL is the only pro sports league with a higher number of injuries than the NHL, but somehow, I can't ever recall seeing a live-action injury during a GM Connected game. If one of your scheduled matchups had to be simulated, however, then you could almost guarantee that one or two of your players would get hurt. The ratio of simmed injuries (tons) to live gameplay injuries (none) created a huge disparity across our league's lineups, placing the teams that had to suffer an occasional simmed match at a huge competitive disadvantage.

Lack of season-long athlete fatigue

To their credit, EA's NHL games do contain coaching sliders that allow you to control how much energy each line on your team will expend whenever they hit the ice. But once a game is over, everyone on your team will always reset to maximum stamina, regardless of how hard they skated, how many hits they absorbed, how many shifts they took, or how many nights in a row they've been on the road. That means your number one goaltender can start every single game, and he will always be in top form. And that you can continue to tap your top scoring lines on their shoulder pads, overworking them evening after evening, without experiencing any drop-off in production, or an increase in injuries.

League commissioners needed more checks and balances

I'll end this article with a story about the exact moment that I lost any desire to ever play the current incarnation of GM Connected again:

We had a group of 20 or so mostly good-natured people from the Operation Sports forums, and had made it about 60 games into our first season. The league's commissioner, who was controlling the Pittsburgh Penguins, had been playing Sidney Crosby and Kris Letang an absurd amount of ice time (doubling the totals of the next-closest athletes in the league). He was also putting up an insane number of goals in his games against the computer (again, twice as high as any other team in the league), leading to accusations of exploitative tactics. And he was starting Marc-André Fleury in every single game, which violated our league's mandate of using your secondary goaltender during back-to-back games.

Accordingly, we asked this owner to quit the league and hand his commissionership over to another user. The rogue Pittsburgh owner responded within the hour, by deleting the entire league and closing his Operation Sports account. Thus, 60 games of league progress were lost, all because one person -- who showed no outward signs of evil when he was put into power -- was given too much control over the entire league's fate.