Start giving yourself little challenges to work towards.
Some things
Build a competitive roster while being a cap floor team.
Trade all your 1st-3rds for a massive surpless of 5-7th picks, and build a team with just those players.
Turn off coach games yourself and use current tactics when possible, let the AI coach control that, and hire bad coaches. (prospects won't develop as fast/at all, and some of their lineup decisions are absolutely Pejorative Slured)
Train D-men to play as forwards and Play Forwards as D-men. Klingberg made a good winger in one of my Saves.
Sign 2 Players to outrageous contracts (the poorer skilled they are the better) and try to build a winner with them as the focal point.
wait until Aug and only sign players that still aren't on a team.
hidden attributes will be usefull eventually, once the known players start retiring.
I used to just do the Dallas rebuild, or pick a team in a really bad position. Phoenix is basically begging to be rebuilt with all the picks they acquired for the 2022 draft. The way they used them was... less than optimal in real life I think, but a perfect team for a full rebuild nonetheless.
I've heard that using your own coaching and certain tactics absolutely breaks the game, so I always just hire the best coaching team I can get and let them do everything. I also don't trade for star players of other teams, or make many trades outside of trading for picks for a rebuild. I think if you use the 1.5 beta the trading AI is at least a little less stupid than before, so it's harder to rip other teams off. What's really funny about getting rid of Benn and Seguin is finding yourself contending with trying to stay above the cap floor because you've shed so much salary, it's interesting to try getting rid of all the subpar contracts because you end up below the cap unless you sign some filler from free agency. Kind of a weird challenge all on its own when rebuilding the Stars if you wanna go scorched earth with all of the vet contracts.
In my last game Shane Wright turned out way better than I think he will in real life, and the game didn't really like the Stars much to begin with, so I tanked for him and then did it again the following year for the Bedard and Michkov draft, somehow neither went 1st overall which was interesting. I don't think either were touted as generational or elite as McDavid or Matthews so that draft was weird as hell.
The only knock with the build-your-team type play in EHM is the game sorta forces you to micromanage certain things in a way I find annoying. Ideally if you're just disinterested in watching your NHL team completely fail in year 1 you'd just vacation until near the draft, but you can't, because you have to keep reassigning your scouts to the WJC and the draft every few months. Plus they never seem to quite get the entire list on their own, so you have to rotate assigning them to watch the 'lesser known players' throughout the year. Sometimes even that isn't enough so you scour the ISS hockey rankings for any guys that still don't have scouting reports. Since hockey is the way it is, it can be kind of a drag to essentially not do a whole lot for the first few years while you wait to see if your picks, outside of the automatic superstars, fill in. So it kind of takes a while to get that sort of playthrough going before you're really managing and developing a team.