There are more bad sides than improvements from last year version.
The Bad:
GM management: There are no more ticket prices management??? In the last couple of years, we used to manage ourselves the price of tickets in order to make the more money as possible and this influenced the attendance. This feature used to be very cool. This year: no more, that disappoints me a lot. I like to manage my team's money and also see than my rink is filled with its maximum attendance capacity.
The draft pick is still the same with the same family names as last year and the announcer rink can't pronounce properly… Scouting and draft pick are still as dull as it was.
Sound and Images: Why did, in NHL '08, we have the right coaches' face for every team and this year… Every team has an unknown face behind the bench. Did Alzheimer also reach the rink announcer??? He forgot Alex Kovalev's name (how could we forget a star player like him???) And he still pronounces the name of Guillaume Latendresse with inaudible retarded syllables like last year. Why did they change the face and hair of Andrei Markov??? They were perfect in last year edition with his starting-to-lose-his-hair plantation and his face was pretty alike and they changed it into a perfect hair plantation and a modified visage (???) Why did they change faces that were right from last year???
The sound from the crowd is less lively than every previous version when we score a goal in our own rink, in my opinion. The announcer lacks dynamism when he announces the home team goals. It could be very interesting if he could elevate his voice with a colored announcement for the home team goals like they tried to do in NHL 05, when star players scored in front of his own crowd.
Gameplay and glitches: When you play in a broadcast view, the manual dekes are mostly impossible, also like last year. The puck goes erratically and independently of where you want it to head with your controller stick.
It's still impossible to put the puck in the top corner with a backhand shot when you are close to the net. Speaking of shots, this years' game still have those very bad looking wrist and backhand shots from time to time. Also, it appears that there are still some awkward physics laws from last year. Sometimes the puck goes into the crowd after hitting the behind-the-net glass (???).
This year, it's still impossible to hit the puck instantly when it's loose. We have to take a quarter of a second to take possession of it and then, shoot.
The fighting engine has improved… a little and maybe less than a little. Zdeno Chara appears to be as tall as Martin St-Louis in the fighting mode and as soon as your grab your opponent, both fighter stand in his position without any movement whatsoever from the legs. It would be great to be able to decline a fight like in a previous version. As it is, your player that is supposed to fight rarely drops the glove as often as your tough guy.
So far, I noticed a major glitch. When you hit a player who has possession of the puck behind the net and the puck goes towards and hit the back of the net, you'll see the red light flashing and a goal was scored (???). When it happened… I exited the game to start another one and I kept myself from throwing my controller through my window.
Rosters: They put a "Sabrina Lahda" in the free agent. Whatever the motive was to put her name and photo in the game, I don't want to have her in my dynasty to screw up the reality of it. I bought this game expecting a realistic one and I was disappointed to see that any team could fetch her (a fictional goalie) from the free agent list.
Players are not rated accurately. One out of a 100 examples, Ty Conklin is rated 76 while he finished 2nd in the league in save %. Last year, I spent almost 30 hour and more to re-rate almost 400 players from the NHL and the AHL. I can see that I'm going to have a hard time again this year. I will propose to EA to hire me for rating players. At least I won't squander my time after the release date of the game and other buyers could enjoy a more realistic player and team rating.
Stats: The goalies' save % is still low. At the end of an NHL 09 season, the top goalie (with at least 25 games played) has a 91,4% when in the real nhl he has at least 92,4% every year. Also, They are not many with a higher than 90% (still with at least 25 games played): maybe 10. Where as in the real nhl, at least the first 25 goalie with that many games played have at least a 90% save percentage.
PK% is ridiculously high. About half of teams have a PK% higher than 88% which is way too far from realism. In the real nhl, the best PK team has 86%, just to say.
They didn't fix the penalty scoring issued. When a penalty is called, the time of the penalty that appears in the game summary is the time where the referee sees the penalty instead of the time of the whistle. Another issue appears from it: if a ref sees a penalty for a team and the other team scores before he whistles, the penalty still appears in the game summary even if they are no penalty in reality because of the goal.
Shots on goal : Maybe the goalies save percentage would be higher if they had more shots against. The average of shots per game in NHL 09 is 25-26 per game (better than last year though) where as in the real nhl, the average amount of shots is 28-29 per game. And it's far worse compared to your AHL affiliated team where your goalie receive a little 22 or 23 shots in simulated games: which is way too low compared to reality.
When you decide to simulate a game and watch the progression of it, you see that the most amounts of shots are taken in the last 5 minutes. For example: your team will shoot 4 times in the 1st, 5 times in the 2nd, 4 times in the 3rd (first 15 minutes) and 10 times in the last 5 minutes of the game for a total of 23 shots : which is still as low.
The Good (improvements): Apart from all good features of NHL '08
-We can now select our defensive pair independently from our forwards line.
-The defensive moves are a good innovation and fun to use making more realistic defensive plays.
The rest is all the same from last year in my opinion.
This review seems to be very negative, but I kind of enjoy this game with the rosters update and the new defensive features. If it weren't because of it, I would have stuck to my NHL '08 (with all the modifications I did to make it realistic) until NHL 2010 come out, hoping that next year version will reach my expectations of a realistic game, as much on the statistic side as on the graphic and gameplay side.