In my 22-23, MacKinnon scored his 73 goals in 309 shots, giving him a shooting percentage of 23.6. The only guys to shoot higher than 20% with 300 or more shots are Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Mike Bossy and Brett Hull.
With that in mind, I decided to check if shooting percentages were out of whack (
see table). They were not for forwards, at least on the whole. Excess goals are coming from excess shots. Defencemen are not shooting well. They are taking more shots and scoring around the same number of goals.
One of my gripes with OOTP's historical mode is that the best base stealers are caught too much. The game sets out to generate a certain number of attempts and a certain number of successful steals. The overall numbers are always spot on, but the AI won't run its crappy stealers. That leaves a lot of caught stealings without a home... the game has to assign those somewhere, so the guys who are running, the top stealers, end up getting caught too much.
Assuming FHM's engine has some things in common with OOTP, I could see this excess of low efficiency shots in FHM causing similar ripple effects throughout the simulation.
-The game sees the expected number of shots but not the expected number of goals.
-The game has to find those goals somewhere, and it makes sense to me that it would disproportionately find them among the top forwards.
-FHM's simulation being so point shot heavy might also account for the missing assists for top forwards (see my previous post).
The simulation is complex and obviously more questions come to mind (how do the excess shots affect goalies? what about shot blocking? are top forwards just feasting on the bottom pairing dmen who are playing 2 mins too much per game?)... but maybe this explains the high goal scoring numbers?