NHL 20: 33 Alumni Teams playable in Franchise mode

NHL 20 will feature alumni teams and allow you to do a lot of things with them you couldn’t do before.

33 Alumni teams will be available to play in Franchise mode in NHL 20. This means the teams can be edited, players can be moved to any team, and the players can have any overall rating you want. That’s everything a fan of franchise mode has wanted for years.

This is perhaps the most exciting news I have heard out of EA in the last 10 years. These teams will be the best teams of almost every NHL franchise excluding the Atlanta Thrashers and Vegas Golden Knights.

They have had these teams before and you could only play them in versus mode or could collect the separate players in HUT, which has always been useless to a player like me who doesn’t play a ton online.

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Upon first reading this, I thought wow that’s cool for a select group of people and not the offline users who have to create all these players manually. Especially when there is no roster sharing.

So I let my skepticism get the best of me and I may have written a tweet, that has been since deleted, about how EA can keep putting these teams out but only a fraction of the people playing this game will use them.

I feel like that’s how a lot of fans at this point think because EA never caters to their offline audience besides adding small things that end up being irrelevant just two months in. Looking at you “Fog of War”.

After posting my tweet, one of my close friends replied to me with the news from Clappy, the community manager, and a silent dance party ensued. After having a night to sleep and being able to settle down, let’s talk about why this is huge to franchise mode users.

Variety and Replayability

If you are familiar with playing franchise mode you know that it can get kind of boring after a while playing with the set rosters EA gives you. So maybe you edit some players here or there and move players to other teams just for some “what if” scenarios.

That’s fun for a while but maybe you’re an older fan of the NHL and you want to have Gretzky roaming the league again. You know he is in all the online modes and on an alumni team for vs but you can’t put him on your roster. So you “create” him in the “Create a player”.

Now, that takes forever, and if you’re like me, you have to get all his details right from his stick brand to the weird mustache thing he had going in 1987. Point being it takes a lot of time to create these players when they are already in the game, but you can’t use them in a mode that is built around creating a franchise.

With the edition of these alumni teams, having the option to play with one of them through a full franchise season is very exciting. The ability to move legendary players around and have them play with other teams makes me very happy. In NHL 19 I created almost 30+ custom made players and spent a lot of time doing it I might add.

Having these players right off the hop makes this game way more enjoyable and replayable which is what all companies want to hear. This gives the game loads of variety and if you have imagination you’re going to love all the now possible scenarios you can do with these alumni teams.

Showing a new generation the old

I’m young. I also am a hockey nerd and junkie so I know who was playing on the fourth line on the 1975 New York Rangers. In saying that, a lot of fans today who play these video games never know any of the depth players who helped teams win cups like Esa Tikkanen or Tod Sloan.

In creating these teams, fans of this generation will be able to learn about players they have never seen before. It also allows fans of the old to reminisce and have fun playing with their favorite players growing up.

What people or older fans don’t realize is that people of my generation never saw Peter Forsberg play at his prime or even saw Wayne Gretzky play one game live. Having the fascination now of looking up these players and seeing how they played and won cups is helping grow the game for another generation.

Maybe I am overthinking this aspect but I loved finding older players who weren’t playing in the NHL on the European rosters when I was younger and learning about their story and finding out they had careers in the NHL way back when.  It’ll be exciting to see new fans appreciate the older generation and maybe some old names get remembered again.

I will be playing this game a lot and I’m even starting a Youtube channel about it! It doesn’t have a name yet but it will be coming out soon so watch out for that. If there’s anything you’re excited about, tweet me @NikofromtheTO or comment below what you think about them adding these alumni teams!