When I keep saying EA was likely handcuffed towards the last few years of the PS3 and 360's life cycle, ram is the major reason why. These two systems which were called "next gen" Never were next gen, PC's often had triple or more the amount of memory even when these machines first were released.
As a contrast today the PS4 and Xb1, have 8 gigs of ram. The speed of the PS4's ram is faster than that of the Xb1, GDDR5 vs GDDR3 which is why the PS4 has so far often had true 1080p at 60fps, as opposed to the Xb1 often having a lower resolution to maintain 60fps.
Now again, most modern PC's have 12, 16, or more gigs of ram in them, the pc I'm currently typing this post on has 16 Gigs.
So when people were, and continue to say, "Oh EA is just being lazy" No actually they weren't being lazy, they were up against the wall specs wise on what the PS3 and 360 could handle, and do so at a respectable 60 fps where they could.
I truly believe EA wanted Hockey IQ to be a reality where each player on the ice was running it's own AI on the fly to react to plays, anticipate where the puck was going etc. There are glimpses of this in NHL 14 but it's not consistent enough that it really had that much of an over all effect on the game.
They have alot more memory now to work with, nearly 10X the amount the last two consoles had. We may not see this in year 1 on the PS4 and Xb1, but I would be extremely surprised if the AI isn't a whole hell of a lot better moving forward.