Building a hockey team is like tuning a car; put too much power in and you’ll just blow the engine out or completely sacrifice the handling. Too much finesse and you’ll never be able to keep up. To create a truly successful and perfect car, attention has to be paid to every detail. What you need to build a perfect team in NHL 08 is very similar.

You must cater it to your needs, while still maintaining balance. Now that doesn't mean your team can’t still be heavy on finesse or hard-hitting, after all, teams do that all the time. However, take a closer look at the rosters of those teams and you’ll find that there’s still enough of the other end of the spectrum to maintain that key word, balance.

To build a hard-hitting team, it's fairly simple, But doing it effectively will often cost you speed and puck handling, for strength and stamina. Ultimately, the goal of any ‘power’ team is to build around the basic principle of wearing the other team down. If the other team is afraid of getting hit, its shots will be rushed, its passing will decrease, and in general the team will tire out must faster.

With a finesse team, things often come back to puck handling, speed, and accuracy. The entire principle of a finesse team isn’t about wearing the other team down; it's about getting your shot, and getting a goal. Often, this type of thought process can lead to a high-scoring affair -- if attention is not paid to still keeping a good checking line in place. Without that awareness, a team can easily fall into the trap of getting caught out of position and always chasing the puck into the defensive zone.

A prime example of a team choosing a style and still keeping from going too far either way is the Detroit Red Wings. The Red Wings are a young team built heavily around the finesse game, led by players like Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg. But the Red Wings still have players who can crash the net and break up plays, for example Kirk Maltby.

Really going either way is entirely preferential, it boils down to what style of game you as a gamer like to play. When you go in to build that next Stanley Cup team though, just remember, lean too much either way and you’ll end up spilling over and wasting your effort.