EAT. SLEEP. PLAY. REPEAT.
Playing thousands of games, in a nutshell. EASHL, Versus, HUT and Be a GM. There's literally no elite player who plays once a week, especially nowadays as there's +50-60 teams trying to win the ultimate prize of hockey, ECL championship. For me example, I've really had my hardest games ever on NHL16 thanks to Finnish Defence Forces. Fucking shit took 9 months away from my hockey career and I've been really rusty. I've never been this shit and it pisses me off every time when I play against players like @Joonas Paatiala(Patz), @debi_85, @Joukki or @Dominointi. Oh my God, even @Basstian23 is sneaky for me these days... Before back then, on NHL14, only forward I had problems to D against (even tho it was fun as hell) was @Foppatofflan, who's btw still greatest forward Europe has seen by far. But there's one cure which helps for this issue: playing daily.
Before, lets say like on NHL14, I played +2500 EASHL/drop-in games combined, 50-100 versus games + HUT so yeah, more than 100 versus-games and that's nothing compared to guys like @plee999 or @Dominointi(seppo). And those guys dominate the leaderboards. So after EASHL and Vs., there's like lets say 2750 games played. Then there's Be a GM what I like to play, a lot. I'm not lying when I say that during NHL14, I played more than 10 different careers, atleast 2-3 seasons per career. Of course I simulated lots of games but also I played much. Even though it was just offline, you always learn when you play. So lets put it this way; who'll know more about the game, player A who plays only EASHL or player B, who plays hundreds or in some situations even thousands of games more than player A. And now on NHL16 I've played under 1000 6vs6-games, no more than 100 offline-games and couple 1vs1-games and you can clearly see it on the ice.
That's it. Of course there's this thing called "hockey IQ" which you cant study. Either you have it, or you dont. That's why there's mainly the same teams or guys dominating the EASHL-leaderboards or 1vs1-boards.
Hope so this helps to realize the importance of playing the game, a lot.