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Originally Posted by Telos
The first thing I thought when entering this thread was that that sounds like an immense amount of work for a feature that will probably be utilized very little. That sounds like a version 3 feature or something. It would be nice, but is a luxury at this point.
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Yeah, that's about the right timeframe. Getting the remaining NHL years done will happen first. I've written about this before, but in short, adding minor leagues presents a variety of problems. It's not a case of "just add the AHL"; years in which the AHL was the only top-level farm league are actually a minority of NHL history. So the old IHL, CHL, and WHL, at a minimum, would need to be in there, too, for there to be enough minor league teams to cover the NHL completely in every season. That brings added complications, because the level of play in those leagues and their exact relationship with the NHL varied quite a bit over the years in some cases. Then there's the complication of shifting affiliations over the years - that's going to require some changes to allow the game to automatically change those year-by-year.
Finally, another problem: the changing nature of the way the NHL has handled its non-roster players. The reserve lists doesn't just represent the minor leagues, they also cover situations where the players on them would be playing in junior, college, or other amateur leagues, Europe, senior hockey, or elsewhere. They're a one-size-fits-all solution for all the different methods the NHL has had of warehousing those extra players, rather than having to have all of those situations modeled and changing year-by-year. So just dumping all of those players into a generic "minor league" doesn't make sense, either, since they'd actually be spread across several leagues in real life.
The bottom line: getting the minor leagues in will take a fair amount of time, thought, and resources (and I haven't even mentioned the research and database work needed.) Appending some kind of pseudo-AHL onto the later historical years isn't a realistic option at all; it would likely require a similar amount of time as coding the WHA took, would create problems in games that have to transition from one system to the other in whatever the cutoff year was, and it would all get thrown out when the minor leagues were done properly. It doesn't make much sense to spend time on that when there are much higher priorities to deal with.