EA Sports’ newest installment of the NHL franchise kicks off officially on September 13th, or September 10th for those who pre-ordered the Deluxe or Ultimate editions, but we have a sneak peak with the EA Access 10 hour trial. As a major “Chel” fan, as soon as I heard the trial was available, this was all I started thinking about, and I had one important aspect to check.
New to this year’s game is all-time teams. This includes all current NHL teams (minus the Vegas Golden Knights of course) and even vintage teams such as the Quebec Nordiques, Minnesota North Stars, and Hartford Whalers. Of course, I wanted to immediately check to see who was on our beloved Philadelphia Flyers. I surely expected the likes of Bobby Clarke, Ron Hextall, and Bernie Parent, but there was one player in particular I wanted to see, and that was Eric Lindros. The Big E has been available before in EA’s “Hockey Ultimate Team” or “HUT” mode, but for those who don’t play online, he wasn’t always available.
I figured, there’s no way he can’t be in the game. He’s been a HUT card before, he’s one of the most memorable Philadelphia Flyers players of all-time, and there’s just no reason for him to not be there. But alas, he is not on the roster. Here is your all-time Philadelphia Flyers team available to play in NHL 20:
Of course, it’s great that names such as Clarke, Bill Barber, Reggie Leach, Danny Briere, Rod “The Bod” Brind’Amour and more are on this team. But when you see players like Michal Handzus and R.J Umberger on here it just feels wrong, doesn’t it? No offense to those guys, Zus’ was a fan favorite here and Umberger was as well at least in his first stint. It’s just … where’s Lindros?
I even did my due diligence and checked the New York Rangers, Toronto Maple Leafs, and Dallas Stars’ alumni rosters just in case for some incredibly stupid reason he would have been placed there, but nope, no Lindros to be found.
Now before we get into a “EA sucks and has always sucked” debate in the comments section, it’s important to remember acquiring rights for alumni players is vastly different than with current ones. Since they’re not part of the NHLPA anymore, these companies have to go out on from what I understand is a year-by-year basis to acquire rights to players like this. So while it’s a bummer that Lindros appears to not be in the game, it’s hard to say for sure that the blame falls on EA.
What IS great about this team though are guys like the ones mentioned previously along with the likes of Dave Schultz, Keith Primeau, Mark Howe, and of course Chris Pronger. It’s funny though, myself and our very own Brad Keffer were talking a few days before the trial came out and said we hoped the Legion of Doom would be in the game, and we got absolutely none of those players. This is definitely a nice new feature for the game, but for us Flyers fans there’s a lot left to be desired.
