I'm not sure this is a reliable approach. We matched up against the #1 team ranked team yesterday and they have a number of players with ridiculous stats and they played a good honest game against us. Unless they were on best behaviour because they know my gamertag I would say they play clean, and I can see how they would rack up some big numbers against any team that didn't know how to play tight defense. If we'd backed out on them because of their stats we'd have missed out on a great game and some education on how to play too.
The best solution to cheese in EASHL is to have more human players. A half-decent human defenseman can take most of the scoring chances for positions where a CPU goalie has weaknesses -- and a strong human goalie would take away those weaknesses too.
That said, I have to say that I'm not seeing much cheese at all in EASHL though. There are a few weak spots we are aware of and actively addressing but so far I'm fairly happy with the goal scoring balance in the game and the style of hockey it encourages.
Of course as people master the game they may uncover unforeseen weaknesses, this is why we've added the ability to tweak gameplay parameters from the server: so that we can address problems without the lengthy turnaround time of a title update. Can't fix everything this way, but it can help in a lot of scenarios.
Addressing the initial post, I agree that probably will have no effect to plead for people to not exploit weaknesses in the game. The problem with having "house rules" that you expect strangers to follow is that the lines are going to be grey and without consensus. When a player feels the other guy is crossing a line he'll likely respond with whatever cheese he knows. Some people start out with the intent to do anything it takes to win, others will switch to that mode if the other guy does something they don't like, and others still if they end up behind in a game, or if the other player is just better (and a rare few not at all). The conclusion to draw is that the game needs to be tight and not have exploits, or at least have as few as possible. Frankly, that's harder than it sounds to achieve and I'm proud so far of how well NHL10 is holding up.
One last point, there's a difference between skill and cheese. There are a lot of great players out there and the online games can be extremely competitive. Someone venturing out there having only played against the CPU could be in for quite a shock. I'm not saying anyone here is doing this, but I have seen people cry "cheese" just because the other player was skilled and they had no answer to it (as opposed to no answer existing). That is not cheese in my books. I want the game to have the sort of depth where it is possible to have prodigious skill and strategy make that much of a difference.