[eldur00]

Originally Posted by JeffR

If the draft isn't used, players appear in the year they first became property of a team (via drafting or signing), even if they didn't actually play an NHL game that year. There are a few exceptions, mainly Soviet-bloc defectors who were drafted years before they defected, e.g. Anton Stastny, where I deliberately left the data out for their pre-defection seasons so they don't show up until they actually came over.

If the player played any games for the NHL team in that season, they're automatically assigned a contract when they're added. If they didn't, only their rights are set; it's up to the user (or AI) to decide whether or not to sign them. Originally, all of them got a contract, but that was changed because the AI had trouble adjusting to a large number of new contracts every season, and because it wasn't realistic in a lot of cases - if a guy was drafted in the 9th round, was never signed, and then happened to play a single NHL game for another team 10 years later, it didn't make sense to force his original drafting team to sign him right out of the draft.

Volchenkov, though, has an error in his data - he's missing the entries that should mark him as Senators property in 2000 and 2001, so he won't show up until 2002. (Adam probably started with drafts on, that's why he's seeing him in 2000.) I'll get that fixed, but it won't be in time for the upcoming update, the data deadline has passed on that.

Thanks for the explanations. It all makes a lot of sense. Do you think in future iterations of the game, we can get a message on July 1st to point out which players have joined the organization ? Like I mentioned, it's a bit cumbersome to have to go dissect the contracts window to see if new players appeared there.