It's easy to not consider the process that goes into a player's rating as you boot up your new copy of NHL 22. As fans, we have the luxury of experiencing what is, more or less, a finished product each October. Fresh features are generally rolled out on a yearly basis, but it all boils down to the joy of either creating our own superstar or controlling our favorite pros.
Player rankings can and are updated through patches, but by and large, what we see is what we get when we first sit down to play the latest installment.