NHL 09 is NHL 06. That's basically all that really needs to be said. Besides the updated rosters and jerseys, the game is exactly the same. Any of the new features they tried to incorporate that the next gen versions had were done extremely poorly. The game has very poor gamepad support. The Be-A-Pro mode which was so famous in the good versions of the game is so bad on this version that you must play every player in your position. The graphics are terrible, face animations are extremely poor. Not to mention the gameplay itself. All the players have really sluggish movement, and the goalies especially simply float across the crease. They don't even have animations, and the few glove save animations they do have seldom even show up. Not to mention the lousy porting job. The game has technical problems. I experienced performance issues on a machine that can run Crysis on high settings.
Overall, dont buy this game.