NHL 11 Blog: HUT Producer Blog - Defense First

Hey everybody, Andy Agostini here I am an Associate Producer on the NHL franchise here at EA Canada. I wanted to talk about my EAUHL team the Supino Mob that I have been working on. As I am not the most skilled player in terms of joystick skills I am building my team to help cover up my deficiencies when playing games. One of my biggest problems is scoring goals so I decided to work on my goalie and defense first so that if I can keep the games low scoring I have a better chance of winning a few of them.

When I started out the mode I was lucky to get David Jones from the Colorado Avalanche on my team along with a few decent European players and CHL prospects. As I said I decided to work on my defense as I don’t score much so I wanted to get d-men who could clear out the front of the net and also get some shots from the point so my forwards who are less skilled can pounce on rebounds and deflect shots.

I started with 4 CHL defensemen and a couple of them were a bit small so I took my biggest CHL defenseman David Searle from the Guelph Storm and started to train him as he is 6′4″ and 225 pounds. I decided he will be the guy I grow and train into a crushing Chris Pronger type of D-man. The new physics engine in NHL 11 really brings out the difference between big players and little players hitting wise so I wanted to use David’s size to my advantage instead of waiting for a big d-man from the NHL to appear in a pack of cards.

The first pack of cards I purchased I received a rare CHK +9 (checking) card and immediately put it on David Searle. That card was a great start to his training toward getting him to be my crusher on D I started focusing on some forwards and seeing if there were any good chemistry bonuses I could piece together. At first I had a pretty random assortment of players from all different teams. I did manage to find two Plymouth Whalers (no not Tyler Seguin) to put together as my third line and I started training them up to be serviceable 3rd liners.

I was pretty snake bitten the first 5 games I played and only scored 2 goals so pucks were a little slow to come by but I managed to get some in the following games and purchase another pack and managed to pick up a Mattias Ohlund. Just like a GM does in real life I put the veteran d-man with David Searle so that I could have someone more developed playing with him.

After getting a few pucks and working on some deals with guys around the office, I managed to pick up Maxim Afinogenov and Matt Cullen to help my first line. I also managed to pick up Zach Kassian from the Windsor Spitfires and he is now on my scratched roster being trained to become one of my first line forwards of the future. I want to save his 130 games till he is a fully trained player.

I also added a forward from the American Hockey League Mike Duco (Rochester Americans) to play with Cullen and Afinogenov on the first line. In their first 3 games together Duco had 3 points and was doing all the things that Cullen and Afinogenov have problems doing which is forechecking and getting the puck back in the offensive zone. So the line has been a godsend for my team who has struggled to score.

My strategy of building my team from the defense out seems to be working as my D now includes Zbynek Michalek, and Shaone Morrison. I also have Cory Murphy (former NHL player) who plays in Switzerland and he has helped out the powerplay quite a bit.

I am hoping to add a better goalie but I have trained up Christian Engstrand (Linkoping, Sweden) and whenever he makes a great save I like saying Great Save Engstrand. Since we sit pretty close together it always gets a chuckle from my co-workers as most of them have never heard of him.

Well have to get back to adding to my team have a couple of guys getting close to retirement so I have to start figuring out what I will be doing with their spots on the roster. Might have to go and buy a few more packs of cards to see if I can get any help for the team or great training cards so I can start training a few more CHL’ers to replace my aging NHL’ers. See you on the ice.

Source - NHL 11 In the Crease Blog