For those too cheap to buy NHL 96, here are NHL 95 rosters updated to the start of the '95-96 season.  (And when I say "too cheap," I don't mean too cheap to fork out $40 for a new game, I mean too cheap to spend $3,000-plus on a new Pentium 133 mhz machine with an ultra-fast video card -- the only computer this side of a Cray that will run NHL 96 to its full advantage.)

My son, daughter and I spent many hours poring through USA Today, the Sporting News Complete Hockey Book, and various stuff gleaned from Web sites (including the NHL, ESPN, NANDONET and NHL Players Association sites) to try to make these as accurate as possible.  There are probably some mistakes -- sometimes these sources didn't agree, and they make mistakes, too.  But this is about as good as you'll find anywhere.  In fact, I did this because all the other rosters I saw posted on-line were outdated or just plain garbage (like the one that has all the NJ Devils getting straight 100s for their attributes).

So enjoy.  And if you spot errors, tell me about them.  Send your thoughts to alenhoff@aol.com.  Maybe I'll be inspired to update these rosters after the trading deadline.

A few things you might want to know:

First, because the game doesn't let you clean-out the free agent list, after a while, you run out of room to create new players and to move players around the league.  The solution, which I used, is to take a player who has retired or been cut from the squad and use an editor to convert that player to a new player on the team (changing name, position, attributes, number, etc.).  That works fine, except that you get someone else's statistics for the 93-94 year.  (If you create a new free agent through the game's central registry, you get phony stats anyway.) 

In moving players between teams in this way, I carefully copied all their attributes.  For new players in the league, I gave them relatively mediocre default attributes, altering only to reflect what I could learn from looking at their Sporting News stat sheets (i.e. I altered some attributes to reflect people who were especially large or small, players who had a history of big-time penalty minutes or players who seemed to be scoring machines).

Most of the teams have 2-4 players on the roster who were cut. I left them there for two reasons. First, there's no practical way to get rid of them, because there's a limit to how many players you can dump onto the free agent list.  Also, I figured that many of them were assigned to the minors just before the season started, and many will  likely to be back in the NHL  later in the season, when lots of players are injured.  All these non-roster players are scratched, and you can dress them when and if they return.  (If others are added to the roster, you can use an editor program -- try AOL's Grandstand area or Compuserve's SportsSims to find one -- to convert these players into whomever joins the team.)

The line-ups I created are educated guesses.  I  placed the highest rated players on the top lines, but there was no way for me to know, for example, whether Mike Keenan will want to play Brett Hull and Geoff Courtnall on the same line.  If you disagree with what I did -- or you know better -- just use the line editing function to make changes.  In making my lines, I tried to reflect what's really going on with the teams.  Alexei Yashin swears he'll rot in Russia before he plays a game for Ottawa this year.  So I scratched him. Same with some players who already have season-ending injuries.  I've also tried to identify where teams are doing strange things, too, like playing a career left wing on the right side.

If you've guessed by now that I took this job pretty seriously, you're right.  But one confession:

You'll find on my beloved Red Wings, a left wing, #66, Alexander Lenhoff, who plays amazingly like a second Sergei Federov.  Alexander is my 10-year-old son, who, in real life, plays a pretty fair game of hockey, and, with our family's Russian and Canadian ancestors, carries excellent hockey genes, too.  I can guarantee you that if you play Alexander, he'll add spirit and energy to the Wings. (Who knows?  Maybe he would have made the difference against the Devils...)  But if you're a purest, just scratch Alexander -- gently, please, he's just a kid -- and dress Ray Sheppard in his place.

DIRECTIONS TO USE THESE FILES:

Backup all your existing *.db files in your Hockey directory.  (I swear these files work perfectly.  But if you get an electronic glitch somewhere in the download process, you'll be glad you backed-up your old files).  Unzip these new files into the hockey directory.  Have fun!

Alan Lenhoff