Largest possible NHL ?
 

I am nearing July 1st and this will be the first time I will be able to add teams and have an expansion draft at the same time.

I don't want to max out the teams the first time around and I don't think it's been mentioned about the limit on teams.

I have two custom leagues (54 and 60 teams) and can't add teams or expand so I am guessing the leagues are maxed out(unless these features aren't possible with custom leagues?).

I am fairly certain that you can only expand by one team a year. This is different than OOTP where you can virtually have unlimited expansions. As to how many you could have, I have not personally tested it out.

You can start a custom league with up to 90 teams but you aren't able to expand past that.

When we first started testing the NHL, we actually had unlimited expansions this year but it proved to be too unstable, so I believe it's limited to 36 teams right now.

You can only add one expansion team to get to 32, but you could add more via the league structure setting.

I could do a fictional NHL because the current NHL is too boring with the same teams year after year.

It's hard to stay interested when you can't have new team match ups .

So with league structure you can still only add up to 36 teams max for the NHL?

I think so, although it may be 40. Not sure off the top of my head.

I mean you can collapse, move or anything else you want now though.

It's definitely 36, I can't add more teams (which shut down my Euro expansion plans in my current run).

If we could go to a maximum of 48 teams with larger playoffs possible (ie 20 or even 24 teams) that would be ideal.

I was really thinking about jumping onto this series. But reading this is disappointing. Sounds like its not on the same Level as there Baseball version yet.

Even though I do have problems with the baseball version if you start to get really huge leagues like past the 60 team mark. But thats not the point

I also envision an expanded euro league at some point. I'll have to wait and see if version 6 comes out with better features before I jump into this.

First, our games are different. I point that out because we generate more players and and coaches than OOTP. The issue is how the AI handles the situation.

When we added the feature this year and in early beta tests we (and I) personally ran, we had unlimited adds. The problem became two fold - the AI couldn't handle it because the quality of players dropped and so we had to cap it again.

Hockey is different than baseball, and yet similar. You aren't just adding 28 teams, you're adding 84.That's adding up to 1400 new possible NHL caliber players into the game when I doubt there's more than 200 right now. Other leagues aren't going to mysteriously collapse, and even if they did it doesn't mean that they would bring the same level of talent to the NHL.

Arguably, there isn't 64 quality NHL goalies right now. How does the league react when you add 56 additional jobs? The talent pool also drops substantially as well. There's many factors to consider when adding these unlimited teams.

But what I am happy we did add is the ability to subtract and move teams, so if you wanted to create a North America vs European division, you could have some fun there.

Thanks for the background.

I think coupling this with the ability to change the underlying generation of players and staff would be an answer. Jeff mentioned that there's no current way to modify a country's base attributes for instance; in a long term career I'd like to every so often increase these for some countries which would help ensure a good pipeline of talent even in an expanded league. And I'm sure some would like to keep it at 31/32 and still have fun playing what-if where the global talent level went way up (or way down) and other kind of scenarios like this.

Why not have the ability to clone players that way if you double or triple the NHL or custom league then just clone the best players that way there would be no shortage of talent. Same goes with goalies and in the future FHM when you can import historical players or teams then the quality will still be there.

I mean, you'll be able to find enough talent for 36, after that it can get more dicey.

If you want to play a Custom 3 tier league, you can start off with a (non-expandable) 90 team top league.

Agreed and it works well, I'm just saying if you allow for the base generation settings to be changed you can then have a much larger NHL (like 48 teams).

I have 54 and 60 team custom league's and it won't let me add or expand teams. What's up with that if like you say you can have a 90 team league but I guess that's only if you start with that many.

I would prefer to grow my leagues that way I can stay interested.

No expansion or no adding of teams make's it boring and non-interesting .