Asunto: Discussion about the importance of the DF stat for forwards

Hey guys,

So I've been training more the defensive stat of some of my forwards lately to make them my defensive specialists for PK duties. And something interesting has happened: All those guys became my top scorers, outscoring some more highly skilled players or at least matching their performances.

Most of my offense comes from my first 2 lines. Here is the breakdown with OR rating,df rating and total points in parentheses.

1st line:
Sutton (1761, DF 38, 34 in 12)
Lachaeu (1897, DF 57, 38 in 15)
Doerner (2086, DF 20, 37 in 15)

2nd line:
Guay (1806, DF 21, 24 in 12)
Bekes (1695, DF 101, 36 in 15)
Hart (2044, DF 57, 37 in 15)

One mitigating factor is that, unless I have a training camp going on, ice time is usually equally spread between my different lines. However, lines 3 and 4 get the same icetime as others (except for less opportunities on special units in most cases and worse linemates). Also, most of them are very close together and the sample size is probably too small to make up any real conclusion.

BUT, all of them are around 3 PPG except for Guay who is at 2. However, Guay is more offensive skilled than Sutton, but got much worse statline. Both play with linemates with around the same number of points.

Bekes is the worst offensive player on his line, but he gets a high PPG. Doerner is the best offensive player on his line, but scored one less than Lachaeu, the defensive specialist (however difference might be too small to draw conclusions here).

Now, I am mostly curious to know if any of you have seen such a pattern before. I am tempted to train defensively all my offensive players (who have decent Qs for it) to see if it affects the game as much as I think it might.

It makes sense to me that by playing good defensively they create more turnovers and more offensive opportunities. By that logic spending some training time on defense would actually improve the overall performance, and offensive one as well.

Before spending too many ressources there, I want to see if this pattern has been noticed elsewhere before.

To clarify, I find especially interesting that Bekes is the worst offensive forward in my top 6 (I have crappy depth at center) but he hangs with the big dogs as best scorers while Guay is doing worse even though he is a better offensive player by a good margin.

I have noticed it in soccer, not hockey. Overall control of the ball. There are a few of us who train a little extra.

This is a Scott question but he’s playing with penguins right now. If I remember correctly Defense on offensive players does very little to help in hockey. In soccer I try to train a second main to around 100 ( mid 655 off 100 or def 655 and mid 100.. but I do it cause there are caps to attributes and may have heard having a mid with offence and defence trained actually help overall rating for all three positions. This is just what my brain remembers

I too believe there is "some benefit" in hockey to training offense on defense and defense on offence. I also believe there is "some benefit" to training centres on aggression, wingers on passing, and for sure defense on technique. I say "some benefit" because generally, I only do this where their training percentages in those areas are high enough to warrant it so that long periods are not spent training those players with lower training percentages for the qualities in question.
The same can be said for my soccer team.

Good morning from Eastern Canada, Happy New Year! I have a request from the population. Is anyone interested in designing the complete uni, puck and pennants for both my teams, hockey and handball. Appreciate all responses. Have a great day.

What my observations have been to this day, and this is without looking at the actual attributes of the players:

LW will score more goals on any given line
RW tend to have more assists than both LW and C
Cs will have more passes than both W, but also more goals than RW (hence why training shooting on center is ALSO important)

[Funnily enough, the R vs L balance seems to be the other way around in handball. Go figure]

But now I feel like I need to go dig into my team's stats from last season (this season doesn't count. I can't even score 1 playing VH vs H against a team with like 30 OR more than I. On the other hand, teams with OR 150 lower than me would be able to get 3 goals vs me, though. Ugh!)

Yep. I mean the stats are a bit skewed for sure (Not all players got equal play time against opponents of much lower strength.), but the overall trend is as described earlier for both season 27 and 28. This season I think I have a total of like 20 goals so far, so like I said, the stats don't apply lol.

So it may not be your player's attributes as much as the order in which the game decides who makes a shot.

NOW, someone please look at our NT's 20yo goalies, Craddock and Gagne, and explain to me how Craddock consistenly has better numbers that Gagne, even though his goalie stats are a bit lower. Is it the 80 in defense? *dun dun dun*

Sorry, little correction to above post: RW will have more passes than LWs, but more goals than Cs, while getting overall a bit less points total than both other forward positions

I train my forwards on defense (and my defensemen on offense) to 100, mostly just because I like round numbers, though I do train some guys to 70% of the base attribute for special teams as well. I don't worry too much about doing it because I know training my guys to the optimal numbers is not going to give me much better players. When I'm maxed for training, I might change it at least for my A-squad guys. The biggest reason why it's not a good idea would be because it'd just be another quality attribute that would need to be high. Bobby Jay gives a good thought in that, if you have a player who is high in the relevant attributes but also has good defense (or whatever) qualities, it's probably not a bad idea to give some extra training to them, but trying to build a team with such a system is probably going to end in nothing but heartbreak, since picking up 17 players who fit would be near impossible without breaking the bank, let alone 40.

As for actual results, I've noticed very little in terms of surprises compared to other results around the game (I do get upsets, but usually they happen with matched tactics). The one thing, however, is I very rarely lose to teams I should beat based on team average, but then most teams with lesser ORs tend to be poor at matching tactics (hell, even some teams with higher ORs are terrible), so giving a good guess on the relevance of such training will always extremely hard.

I have another point to make. While overall position attributes are important, I think I've had enough games like this one:
hockey.powerplaymanager.c...

where I dominate on shooting, play 2 notches higher in importance and the average OR isn't *that* different... yet still can't score a *&*&?*& goal...

That shooting is importanter.

(I've had a really good sample size with the last 2 WC runs of the U20 team, too).

Train shooting, folks.

well it took a little while to get answers on this thread, but it didn't disappoint. Lots of interesting impressions have been shared. It all basically seems to boil down to this though: nobody knows for sure.

Like Bobby, I only train it if the Q is good for it. I guess I kinda decided that I would train some guys for the purpose of eventually selling on the market (I only train them in the usual optimal setting of 2-1-1 and shooting/technique) and some players I would train for purposes of being on my team and I would try some slightly different approaches there.

I guess there are way too many variables here to isolate only this one and know for sure if it affects the game or not. Although it probably does somewhat... the question is... do these extra points of D for a fwd impact the game more than the same points distributed in other categories would? I guess that is too complicated of a question to get a definite answer to.