tarheelhockey
Offside Review Specialist
It's harder to make trades in general, but the trades that work are better than what the older games would let you get away with.
Step 1 is to make sure you look at the "skaters/goalies giving away" screen for each team. And by that I don't mean just the trade block, but the one you can see by flipping through the rosters. This is the full list of red-highlighted players that the other team is willing to trade. I tend to sort the lists by position and role, to get a sense of which players I could use the most.
After you pick a target, step 2 is to look at which players on your roster are green-highlighted. These are the players the other team wants. Obviously it's up to you to decide which ones to part with, but I'd suggest trading guys who are in the 23-24 range with a low rating (below 65) and still have enough potential to have a high trade value. These guys never work out for me anyway, so I trade them while I still can.
Step 3 is to just make sure the overall balance of trade value is fair. The computer generally won't take a bunch of garbage for a good player. You're best off either offering an equal player in a 1-for-1 deal, or a slightly lower rated player combined with a draft pick or lower-end prospect. Usually it's pretty simple to see if the trade value bars match up. If you offer a draft pick and the deal is rejected but the CPU says it's close, just bump the pick up by a round.
It's a slow process, but you can make some solid non-ripoff trades this way. I think it's better than the older trade engine that would let you just screw the CPU completely.
