[AcGold]

For passing you definitely can not have the receiver behind and to the left or right. If they are directly behind you it's a doable pass.

Also moving the stick a little to the forehand before passing helps.

The protect puck is the most valuable move you have. Most players are way too aggressive so the reason the passing % is so low is that people get way out of position and double team the passer. So you protect the puck and evade the attackers. Find an open lane and you'll almost always have an odd man rush. So if they chase you to the corner use the r1 saucer pass to shoot it up to the blueline where there should be a wide open man. The R2 pass is almost always along the ice so it's super easy to intercept, the saucer pass works really well if you protect the puck and draw the attackers away from the receivers, passing with R2 through them will almost always never work. For long passes the skater and passer need to be skating in the same direction for it to be a high % chance of being received.

A player is far away with multiple defenders in the way and he's skating in a non-parallel direction? forget it, circle around or pass off to the other d. You just gotta shake off the one or two attackers, most people try to pass through them because they panic and the passes never work.

The way you use the controller matters as well, if you press the buttons in a frantic manner the puck goes all over the place. You have about a second or two window for passes and it's got to be a smooth sequence of button presses because if it's frantic the controls just don't respond.