It can depend. Madden has had some pretty horrible years lately. I think it was 15 where it was just interceptions galore, and you could take pretty much any posts about FIFA and they'd fit right in with NHL. I can't really speak to NBA 2k or Live.

Generally sports games always suffer from the same issue, which is almost a paradox. You can only control so much with just a few buttons and joysticks, and so there's always this balance between realism and playability. Especially when in a 1-vs-1 match, you have two humans trying to control 10-22 virtual players depending on the game. So by default, you need the CPU to carry a lot of the weight, and so there's another balance there with how much it will handle and how much is put on the player. Too much and it's too easy, but too little and it becomes inherently unfair. And it all takes place within a virtual world. No matter what realistic elements are incporated, everything is constructed from the ground-up by developers, so it's never real, it's always a virtual world.

In NHL, it's pretty clear that they've implemented certain randomness to give the appearance of realism. You can make the right pass, in the right direction, at the right power, and the receiving player can still miss it or have it bounce off a skate. Or the pass might be 10-15 degrees off despite that you had your stick in the right direction. And this is justified because in real life players can miss passes.

And there are comparables to this in basically any sports game. In Madden, it's the obvious QB to receiver passing. The more they want the games to appear real and less 'video gamey' the more that playability seems to suffer, and the more frustrating it becomes as the user.

With a game of NHL, if you just watched two people playing, it would appear incredibly realistic for the most part, but as soon as you're actually the one with the controller in hand, and you now know exactly what you're pressing and what you're trying to do versus what is actually happening in-game, it becomes really annoying.