would love to play some some NHL 2001 on PC, but I'm just terrible at it lol.
Its bad news then. NHL 2001 is the 2nd easiest hockey game I've played, the easiest being NHL 2002. As with any hockey game, your first step is to determine where to set up the one-timers for goals. It is easier to do this with the EA Sports versions because you can use the play editor to set your offensive zone alignments. Test each alignment and then practice passing from your controlled player to the other players on your team and attempt one-timers. You will eventually find one that will work.
I had done this on NHL 06 and NHL 08. There was one alignment where I could put a player to the left of the goal. Then on each faceoff, you win the faceoff and pass back to the defensemen on the right. Move into the zone and there was a "Sweet spot" where you could have the D-man along the half wall on the right, and could sit there to wait for your alignment to clear. You could sit there because this small portion of the ice, the AI player that is man-to-man to your D-man would keep a fair distance away. Then you could pass to your player to the left of the net, and one-time a goal easily. BUT, I gave up on this for a few reasons. The first being that it is boring to score 30+ goals a game.
Plus all the EA Sports NHL games from 2000+ have a soft cap, or "equalizer" to scoring. Depending on the skill of the AI goaltender, your goal cap will be between 27 and 33 goals scored before the AI will cheat and it becomes very difficult to score. It doesn't matter if you have goalie substitutions on or not.
The other reason I stopped playing the NHL games was because I ended up being a modder for them. I was the only roster editor for NHL 06 for awhile, and then also modded the other parts of my game to make it more accurate. Actual jerseys, ice surfaces, boards. I redid the menu, made custom teams. Replaced the sounds, all that stuff. But the issue then for me is I didn't have time to actually play the game. Making up-to-date rosters is like a second job. Every day need to check all the websites for movements, call-ups, send-downs, and then handle rosters for international teams. You can take 1 day off, but then you are behind. It was fun but ended up not being fun.
My go-to sports games are baseball games. I haven't played a hockey game in many years now.
