Things to Add to Your NHL Legacy Gameplay

In all of these cases, you can watch my games at https://www.twitch.tv/concernedfriend to find examples of what I’m saying to better grasp the concepts. You will never improve at anything unless you have an idea of what to improve. Here are a few things to focus on adding to your game if you haven’t already. A lot of this is intended for more of an intermediate level so if you’re at a more basic level, I’d probably redirect you to some NHL14 youtube videos. It’s basically the same as legacy in mostly every way.

• Offensively, the worst thing you can do is make yourself predictable. You’re right if you think skating straight to the net makes the most sense, but you’re making it suuuper easy on your opponent to defend you. You need to mix up your movement and experimenting with the L2 button to throw your opponents off is one of the best things you can do. You can backskate a bit as soon as you enter the offensive zone or do it in the neutral zone to get a better angle into the zone. You can also just use it to turn around and get better passing or shooting options. You’ll see me doing it VERY frequently on stream and it’s a super useful weapon to keep yourself unpredictable. Quick dekes are also very useful and a couple more advanced dekes work well too. I’d advise people to quick deke to the outside more often to gain some space. You don’t always need to cut to the middle. Gaining space is key.
• Defensively, back-skating is useful for squaring up to the puck carrier and getting a better angle for your pokecheck or for your guy to intercept a pass. You’ll also see me doing that all the time on stream if you pay attention.
• Cutting into the slot gives you a short-side shot but did you know it also gives you a very high-percentage far-side wrister? It’s actually one of my go-to shots because almost everyone will always cover short-side. If you’re coming from the blue-line in particular, you can feint to the middle, sidestep the defender slightly to the outside and then cut back to the slot for an easy goal. It works super often and puts your opponent in a VERY dangerous 50/50.
• Rather than just deking backhand to forehand, you can try deking from the backhand straight to the pulled back forehand. You’ll notice Nordet (D1 PIT) utilizes this the most. It’s an easy way to side-step dmen as well as draw penalties AND get into a better shooting position quickly.
• Faceoffs are incredibly important but there’s an actual formula to it similar to rock-paper-scissors where certain faceoff tactics beat others. Having possession of the puck to start a shift is invaluable and learning faceoffs will improve your game exponentially more than literally anything else I can tell you unless you don’t even know how to shoot. If you want the complete faceoff guide, message me.
• Saucer passes on the breakout are VERY good. You can press R1 to complete one. It’s just as strong off the boards and saucers confuse defenders, giving you a better chance at a breakaway or odd-man rush.
• Speaking of which, so many of you seem to struggle with breakaways. If you are one of those people then you need to do a better job at paying attention to what your opponents are doing. It is one of the more basic plays and there are multiple ways to do it. Watch streams or even just what your opponents are doing on breakaways and practice it yourself. I score on about 80% of breakaways and you should strive for the same level of execution. It’s BY FAR the easiest thing to master in practice mode and should be the first thing you figure out on this list. If you want a slightly more advanced technique, then try protecting the puck right next to the defender to gain some space and you’ll be able to get really tight semi-breakaway goals by beating the dman and goalie at the same time.
• The last thing that’s fairly basic and easy to employ is just going to the forehand or backhand before passing just to change up the angle a bit. Use your right stick more. Being predictable will make you easy to play against so expand your options.

I’m going to leave it at that for now because this is plenty for a lot of players.