NCAA Hockey season for NHL 11 - john1842msu1977's Blog

john1842msu1977's Blog

NCAA Hockey season for NHL 11

Posted on February 24, 2011 at 12:29 PM.

(8)

After I bought NHL 11 around Christmas, I immediately started to create 30 of the top NCAA Hockey programs by using the Create-a-Team feature to accurately recreate the jerseys/logos for each team... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBjiGXpNBMs

I used each NCAA Hockey team's alumni that are now in professional hockey to fill out the rosters. www.hockeydb.com proved to be a great tool to find the alumni for each team.

Anyways, I just finished a season using Michigan State. I used the NHL season mode for the league and simply substituted each of the 30 teams I made in for the respective NHL teams. I placed them into divisions based on geography and their actual NCAA Hockey conference affiliation. All 9 WCHA teams that I made and 6 of the CCHA teams were placed in the Western Conference. The remaining 5 CCHA teams along with the 6 Hockey East and 4 ECAC teams that I made were placed in the Eastern Conference.
Here are the final regular season conference standings:

WESTERN CONFERENCE
1. Michigan State
2. Minnesota
3. North Dakota
4. St. Cloud State
5. Denver
6. Wisconsin
7. Colorado College
8. Michigan
9. Minnesota Duluth
10. Michigan Tech
11. Nebraska Omaha
12. Ferris State
13. Lake Superior State
14. Northern Michigan
15. Alaska Fairbanks

EASTERN CONFERENCE
1. Boston College
2. Ohio State
3. Cornell
4. Vermont
5. New Hampshire
6. Boston University
7. Maine
8. Yale
9. Notre Dame
10. Clarkson
11. Harvard
12. Bowling Green
13. Northeastern
14. Miami of Ohio
15. Western Michigan

I am pretty happy about how accurately the simulations were for the 29 AI controlled teams. For the most part, the 16 teams that I expected to make the playoffs, did. I was a little surprised that Michigan barely made it in as the 8th seed. They have the most former players in the NHL out of any NCAA Hockey program. But after playing them several times during the season, it is painfully obvious that Marty Turco sucks in NHL 11! He was one of the worst goalies I faced. Even several of the AHL goalies were better than him. I guess this might explain why U-M wasn't better than they were. I did notice that U-M finished top 5 in goals scored, so at least that was accurate.

As for the team I am using (Michigan State), it's obviously impossible to get a truly accurate representation of how good they are by playing all 82 of their games myself. If I had simulated the entire season, I imagine they would still be one of the best teams though and probably would have still won the Central Division, where I placed them. Although they don't have the scoring punch of teams like Boston College, Michigan, and North Dakota, the starting defensive pair of JM Liles and Duncan Keith is second to none and Ryan Miller is obviously one of the best goalies in the NHL. Tough to lose games when you don't give up many goals! Meanwhile Shawn Horcoff, David Booth, Jim Slater, Justin Abdelkader, Tim Kennedy, and Drew Miller gave me just enough scoring punch to win most of my games. I ended up going 60-16-6 for the season and clinched the "President's Trophy."

I will add another blog entry once the playoffs have concluded. (Go Spartans!) Instead of using a best-of-7 series like the NHL has, I preset the playoffs to be best-of-3 series. Each NCAA Hockey conference uses this format for their first two rounds of conference tournaments, so I figured this would be the most accurate. I didn't want to do a single game (best-of-1) for each round, since the games wouldn't be on neutral ice like the real NCAA tournament. Hopefully EA Sports will add the real NCAA teams next year so that we can all enjoy it!

Comments

# 1 stlstudios189 @ Feb 24

they need to make a ncaa hockey game

# 2 celticboy25 @ Feb 24

would you be willing to share the sliders you're using for this season?

# 3 john1842msu1977 @ Feb 25

Sliders are pro level, hardcore. Stick lift turned down to 1 for both me and cpu, poke check at 0 for both, pass int at 0 for both, pass accuracy at 5 for both, all shooting accuracy/speed and goalie sliders are at default.

# 4 celticboy25 @ Feb 25

thanks man. i might check those out with the hockey east teams i created

# 5 CS10029 @ Feb 26

Wish you could share your Season file, haha.

# 6 Eski33 @ Feb 26

Ferris State??? My alma matre...YES!!!

# 7 dubuque @ Sep 2

can you up load this in a game save

# 8 john1842msu1977 @ Sep 2

Dubuque,

PS3 is now encrypting all game save files so there's no way for me to share either the rosters or the season file. A lot of people have complained about this to Sony and they don't seem to care.

And once again, NHL 12 will NOT have an EA Locker or Roster Vault of any kind. I'm probably going to be skipping NHL 12 for this reason. Hopefully Sony and EA Sports can resolve whatever issues are needed to resolve in order to correct this issue going forward.