During the regular season, the game’s simulation predicts that the Predators will rack up 110 points, winning the Western Conference over the Dallas Stars and last year’s Stanley Cup finalists, the San Jose Sharks. The Montreal Canadiens — predicted to finish second in the Eastern Conference and well above last year’s champions, the Pittsburgh Penguins — will meet the Predators in the finals. Their hopes of a Cup will be destroyed by Nashville in six games, with Filip Forsberg scoring an astounding 26 points over the course of the postseason.
Individual player awards favor the Edmonton Oilers’ 19-year-old captain and budding superstar Connor McDavid. The 2015 first-overall draft pick is predicted to win the Hart Memorial and Art Ross trophies (awarded to the league’s most valuable player and leading point-scorer, respectively) as well as the Ted Lindsay Award, which is presented to NHL’s outstanding player as selected by the members of the NHL Players Association.
EA Sports has had a pretty good history with its real-world predictions thus far. Over the last 12 years, the Madden franchise has picked the Super Bowl winner correctly 75 percent of the time, and though NHL 16 picked the terrible, no good, very bad Washington Capitals to win it all last year, it did correctly pick the San Jose Sharks to make it to the Stanley Cup Finals.
NHL 17 is now available for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, and is among the better offerings that EA Canada has put out in recent years. In our review, we called it “a solid step in the right direction that makes the series’ recent missteps feel like history” and praised the sheer amount of content packed onto the disc. It’s the first game in the series to not release on the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 since the current-generation systems were introduced.
