NHL 24

2024 Update: Soooooooo the bad news. It sounds like an update EA made to the game at the end of 2023 completely broke this game specially your sliders in this mode will no longer save between games. EA will almost certainly never fix this, so you'll either have to change your sliders EVERY. SINGLE. GAME. or... I don't even know what the alternative is. This soul sucking achievement just got a billion times worse. I'm leaving this guide up in case this does get fixed in another patch (el oh el).

The NHL Record for points in a career is 2,857, held by Wayne "The Great One" Gretzky. This record is so mind bogglingly insane that even if he never scored a single goal in his entire career, he would STILL hold the record for points. Points in the NHL come through either goals or assists, i.e. passing the puck to another player and they either score off the pass or pass it to someone else who then scores.

This is going to a LONG grind, made infinitely worse due to the number of repetitious and unskippable cutscenes in Be A Pro that add hours upon hours to the experience.

And significantly worse, just like NHL 23 there is no set year your character retires once again. I've gotten a report of a fellow member of our community being force retired at the end of the 2040-2041 Season which is ridiculously early, so you're going to want to play a LOT your first decade in the league because once you're retired there's no going back without reloading a save.

You only have 21 Seasons (the end of the 2044-2045 season) to get the achievement before you're force retired, so unfortunately you can't sim the entire thing because on average you will get less than 100 goals a season this way and that won't cut it. This is much worse than previous NHL games where you got 25 seasons before retirement, so you're going to have to play a lot more of this mode in order to get the amount of points in time.

I do say 21 seasons because that was my experience in both versions. In NHL 23 it was erratic and I got a different retirement year each time so I just deleted my guides for that one because of this inconsistency. If you get a different retirement year in this game PLEASE let me know.
 
Some quick math here, you need to average approximately 136 goals for 21 seasons to hit the achievement. That's a LOT of playing, but then you realise Gretzky did this in REAL LIFE in only TWENTY seasons against real life people trying to kill him and not AI nerfed computer opponents. Perspective always helps. With that out of the way, start a new Be A Pro career.

• Watch the EXACT SAME unskippable cut scene that has been in this game for at least four years running
• Create your character. You'll want to be a Center so you can get the puck as quickly as possible, even though you won't start as a Center you'll eventually get there in a couple of seasons. I highly recommend being a Sniper as it gives you a nice boost to shooting off the bat
• Start in the NHL
• Choose your team. It really doesn't matter who since you'll be playing a lot early on and doing everything yourself
• Game Settings
• Be A Pro Settings
• Period Length is up to you. I like to go 20 minutes periods so I can score as much as possible early on in the mode while quickly levelling myself up in the process
• Difficulty to Rookie
• Rules to Off
• Be A Pro Settings to Classic
• Be A Pro Simming Penalty to Off (VERY IMPORTANT!)
• Weekly Gained XP Reminder to Off
• Auto Save to On
• Back out a menu and select Advanced Settings
• Playoff Series Length to Single Knockout
• Back out a menu to Gameplay Sliders. Adjust everything to your favour while nerfing the CPU to 0. Be sure to read the descriptions, some sliders are reverse so you want some to be 0 you for and 100 for the CPU
• Back out two menus and Start Career
• Sim through the Preseason to the Regular Season, your stats don't count here so it's a waste of time
• Play, play, play and score, score, SCORE! Now a VERY IMPORTANT thing to note here is there is a 99% chance your Gameplay Sliders will have reset back to default settings since EA doesn't care whatsoever about fixing this mode. While in game, you'll have to change all your sliders again and now they should stay set for the rest of this achievement. I only had to change them once and they stayed the entire rest of my career, please let me know if you have a different experience
• What I did was played as much of the first season as I could stand, I ended up with 400 something goals. Some games you'll find a certain goalie is just a brick wall so after I got a few goals I would quit the game and let it sim the rest. You want to maximise your time at all costs

And that's really all there is to it. Score as much you can while keeping an eye on how much time you have left. You definitely want a huge cushion before you start simming out the rest of the seasons, as again you'll be lucky to average 100 points per season that way.

Now a strategy I did this year while Simming that definitely paid off in the long run is I did NOT use any Trait upgrades or purchase any salary perks while I was playing. You're already a machine while you are actively playing and the AI is too pathetic to stop you, so there is no reason to upgrade yourself during this time. And besides, you'll level up naturally just by playing as you get plenty of experience points for things like scoring and checking. Why did I do this? Because at around the 14/15 year mark of your career your player starts to get old and his stats naturally decay. This is when I started using my Trait upgrades and salary perks, because at this point I was simming and wanted to give my player every advantage he could have.

When I was in the 2040s of my career, my player had decayed to a 90 overall and only scored 78 points in a sim season. Using all the Traits and salary perks I had saved, I got him back up to a 98 and he scored 118 in a sim season. It makes a big difference and is definitely my strategy going forward when we have to do this achievement again in NHL 25.

As far as the rage inducing endless cutscenes of your broke ass teammates begging you to buy them pizza, your dumbass agent getting you eleven deodorant deals a season, and your idiot coach bringing your game to a crashing halt to tell you to score more when you're up 47-0, I'm afraid I still haven't found a solution. When your teammates harass you about going to a botanical garden, you can pick the Star answer and that'll usually end the conversation sooner, but it's not much. I did avoid buying any Salary Perk that has a limited time because that leads to another cutscene with your stupid agent asking you if you want to renew it. Towards the end of my career when I was simming I got a turbo controller and just held the A button down while I did things around the house. I'd check the screen every now and then, and if it had started a game I would just quit out, Sim to Next Big Event, and turbo down the A button again.

The achievement will not pop when you score your 2,858th point but rather after the game ends. Make sure to keep simming to the end of career for the Golden Years achievement.

Thank you for reading this overly long guide. As a treat, here's the fan favourite GretzkyFacts (TM)!

• He scored his 2,857 points in 1,487 games across 20 seasons. It would take him playing an additional SIXTEEN FULL seasons without scoring a single point for his point average to fall below one point per game. He retired in 1999, so it wouldn't be until the eleventh game of the 2017-2018 season before his average would fall below one point
• He's the fastest player ever to score 1,000 points, doing it in 424 games. He was 23 when he scored goal #1,000. He's also the fastest player to score 2,000 points, doing so in 857 games. That's only 433 games after his first 1,000
• From 1981 to 1985 he scored 323 goals in 314 games for a 1.03 goal per game average. Only 170 NHL players ALL TIME scored more goals than he did in only four years
• The legendary Sutter Brothers (Brian, Darryl, Duane, Brent, Rich, and Ron) all played in the NHL and scored a total of 2,934 points. That's 77 more points than Gretzky, but he scored his 2,857 in a third less than all of their combined games
• He holds the NHL record for hat tricks (3 goals in a game) with 50. Approximately 74% of all players who ever played in the NHL have never scored more than 50 GOALS, thus Gretzky has more hat tricks than the majority of the NHL has goals
• Out of his twenty seasons, he led the NHL in assists SIXTEEN times. Second place is Bobby Orr, who led the NHL in assists five times