Jack Reacher

Just a thought, but this could add some good depth to the game.
 
Instead of setting up the tactics like we do now, how about hiring a coach who is known to run a specific system.
If you want to run a defence-first trap-style team, hire some kind of fictional Ken Hitchcock. Have fictional bench bosses to represent each of the tactics that exist now.
Imagine re-creating some kind of Broad Street Bullies scenario where your roster is populated with tough players and you have a coach who favours intimidation?
Like you match your players to your systems now, you would sign players to run the system your coach prefers. If you don't, he may not give proper ice time to a certain player, or may even have the authority to sit that player out.
 
And that player would then demand a trade!
 
Like players, you could have upwardly mobile coaches who refuse to re-up their contract after a successful season.
 
You could integrate coaches with the existing 'traits' system. Have coaches who clash with lazy or arrogant players. Coaches who are challenged by the idea of motivating lazy players. Coaches who have a calming influence on nervous or anxious players and coaches who push those same players into mental-breakdown territory.
 
Loving or hating the coach could add another reason for a player to sign or not sign with your team.
 
The coach could also factor into a team's reputation.

Definitely a good idea, Eric!  Coaches have been suggested before, along with other staff like Scouts.  There is no ETA to implement these into the game, but I know Anders and Tobias have it on their list.

And just like that my top player is out the rest of this round and I lost game 1 (at home) in a shootout. Grrrrr

I hate my team. LOL. I thought the year would go great since I got some of my key veterans returning, but all it did was just sink me in 16th early on. It took me 10 games to actually get out of 16th only to be stuck in 15th for 5-8 games. I stayed mediocre for the rest of the season then my team finally woke up but it was too late. I made a playoff push and on the last day of games, I beat my opponent 5-2, which I thought would seal my playoff hopes, but no I lost out the #8 seed to another team that had a goal differential of +4 and I had +3. It was quite disappointing and quite upsetting since this was my second time of not making playoffs in franchise history. I just wanted to share my story...BE Prepared no matter how good you think your team is! Good Luck to all teams in playoffs and everyone BE PREPARED, I WILL BE BACK! lol

It’s because the first seed sucks

Hey guys, i got an idea. What if game plan hockey manager introduces national teams such as Russia, Sweden and Finland just to name a few. We as coaches can sign up for a national team the same way we would do for a regular club. Just as in football, we would have to go through qualifiers to secure our spot in the World championships tournament and square off to have an overall champion. We can still use the GHL,SHL and the top leagues in each country to full our roster. We can also have world rankings.

I would like to see national teams implemented as well, and I think thre's several ways to go about that. Definitely something that would make things more exciting.

am I to understand a guy like this can quit because his team sucks and join again with a team as good or better than the one he abandoned?  

It's been done before, yes.  But if you see it, just report it because it's technically cheating.  Thanks for the heads up!

There are actually a lot of people who put the time and aggravation into deep scouting.  I do think having a little bit of work is what makes you earn your keep a little, so am on the fence whether I am a fan of it or not.  Just like scouting in free agents, you have to go look at each player in detail and if you are willing to do the work you have an advantage.  
 
Saying this the I can see where your idea has merit, not sure which side of the fence I am on with it though is all.

My method of scouting the draft class involves inputting their ratings and such into a spreadsheet so I can more accurately compare Player A to Players B, C and D.
It's a bit of a painstaking process the way the prospect list is set up now, where I have to click on the player, then click on 'show all ratings,' then click on 'show all traits'
Rinse and repeat about 250 times.
 
I would love, love, love it if the prospects were presented the way I view my team's roster on the 'ratings' page, where everything is laid out in a cut-and-pasteable way.
 
Even if you're not doing some kind of foolishly labour-intensive process like mine, I think it would help less involved GMs if they could do a bit more eyeballing of the draft class before the draft.
 
I've heard that everything in this game matters, but I don't think everyone is accounting for everything in draft evaluation, because accounting for everything is currently a lot of work.

Well it looks like the age factor of the game has caught up to me. I am trading everyone away except Kadura who is untouchable. In return for these high overall players I have, I need atleast 1 prospect(88+ overall and less than 20 years old) and a draft pick. The asking price is steep because these players can make an impact on your team instantly. Any team that cannot afford that price please message me to find out what type of trade we can negotiate. ALL TEAMS MUST message me before offering, if teams don't I will most likely ignore your offer. Thanks and let those messages come in!

I’m not in the LIHL but I love meeting and conversing with other managers, this game has a great community.
 
I’m Gator Raid, manager of the Unity Fire Dogs in the GHL, if you have any questions about the game or just want a second opinion on something regarding lines, tactics, trades etc. let me know! I’m learning new stuff about this game everyday, so I don’t know everything, but I’m willing to pass on what knowledge I do have.
 
Talk to you soon

In my experience changing the training hasn't done much if the player is a consistent player that gets injured. Go to a player's individual stats and check how many games he has played in each season and based off of that determine if he gets injured or not. like 5-10 games injured is fine like once every 5 seasons or something, but if it's more frequent then I suggest either trading him while he still has value or having a backup to play his role since he will probably get hurt. One thing that has worked for me is changing the tactics. I used to play on hard and players would get injured left right and center, so I decided to to play around with those tactics for one season. For every 20 games, I switched up the tactics each time(one time "Hard", next "Dirty", and so on). From that correlation I determined player injuries had something to do with those tactics. From that experiment, I learned that more injuries occur in "Dirty" tactic, then "Hard", then "Normal", then "Fair", and then "Safe". My team had 0 injuries when playing in Fair and Safe. Hope this helped.

Hello, I found my way to this beautiful Hockey Manager in January, but I have only been playing for a few days.
I am from Germany and manage the Goldfield Giants in LIHL.

In my experience changing the training hasn't done much if the player is a consistent player that gets injured. Go to a player's individual stats and check how many games he has played in each season and based off of that determine if he gets injured or not. like 5-10 games injured is fine like once every 5 seasons or something, but if it's more frequent then I suggest either trading him while he still has value or having a backup to play his role since he will probably get hurt. One thing that has worked for me is changing the tactics. I used to play on hard and players would get injured left right and center, so I decided to to play around with those tactics for one season. For every 20 games, I switched up the tactics each time(one time "Hard", next "Dirty", and so on). From that correlation I determined player injuries had something to do with those tactics. From that experiment, I learned that more injuries occur in "Dirty" tactic, then "Hard", then "Normal", then "Fair", and then "Safe". My team had 0 injuries when playing in Fair and Safe. Hope this helped.

It's just bad luck when you get a bunch of injuries like that. My worst luck was when I lost my 4 starting centers and half my d-men over a few day for multiple games and a couple have-season injuries.
 
What I find works to prevent injuries is to ensure my players are only playing when they are fully fit. For something more pro-active, I try is to build a team around non-injury-prone players. In my experience, when you check a players home page, look at his current headlines. Injury-prone players will generally have multiple injuries listed over multiple seasons. Though injury-prone studs can hide their past injuries by getting player of the week/stars of the game. I've read somewhere on this forum before that injury-likeliness (durability?) is a hidden stat in this game, but you can sort of guess what it would be just by seeing how often a player gets injured. (I think when this game was first being developed durability was actually a visible stat.) Unfortunately I don't think age has anything to do with injury rates as I've had a bunch of old veterans on my team the past few seasons and none of them have been injured. 
 
TL;DR: It's definitely not a bug.

What exactly causes a string of continuous injuries to your team? I've never had it this bad before. Nearly every game I get some sort of injury. Including tonight where I had two injuries, one of them being major. My team is mostly old, but that hasn't caused injuries this consistent before, and they are all solid GHL players, so their endurance is high. I've tried reducing training to easy/medium for most, with easy going to the older guys, but that hasn't really settled down anything. I almost want to say this is some sort of strange bug or something. I recently switched the training levels down, so maybe it takes a while for training effects to settle in? Seems weird though. 

Thanks for the replies.
 
Paul, that list was basically what I was looking for, thanks.  It's not something I was planning on basing my decision on, but it seems like yet another bit of information that can be used to paint an overall picture of a prospect.  

I'm not sure how much importance a prospects reputation has since they can change over time and it also might be based on which league they are in.  For example, a Shooting Star in a lesser league would be equal to a Decent prospect in the Canadian league.
 
In terms of best to worst, (I think) it goes:
1. Shooting Star
2. Up and Coming
3. Promising
4. Hot Prospect
5. Decent Prospect
 
For your first draft I would take Erzac's advice.  Use a combination of Overall and factor in Development.  And make sure that the player's ratings fit your overall tactics (unless you want to use them as trade bait, then just take best available regardless of specific ratings).

Quick update, I'm currently on an 8 game winning streak since I made the adjustments. Thank you for all your help!

Completed players (maybe around 25-26) should want to play for the team, no matter of what tier (ideally in the league of their overall) but they should refuse to stay in affiliate (traits could be taken in consideration). There should be possibility that they could terminate contract after season and become free agents or go straight to Europe.
 
Not everybody but some movement is needed and it could work slightly like roster limit.

that means I have a bunch of turkeys that don't rise to the challenge and can't stay healthy!!!  

Your players “Big Games” trait is what mainly affects winner instinct. Also goalies seems to have more of an affect than skaters.

Yup, Bublik was insanely good... I acquired him by luck. He asked French Gulch Black Knights (after winning cup there in S2) insane money to resign, so he went to FA and I got him for much more reasonable salary... the salary got higher with each season and more cups, but we managed to afford him and he worked hard for every dollar. His number of shutouts is insane and he got us all 5 cups / so you can correct that he has 6 cups and he was in the GHL finals for 9 times including 7 in a row. But in S10 the salary demands started to increase again and our cap situation was too tight, so he went to FA once again. And we didn't win any cup since then.