The "skin tone" in NHL VIEW is for your hand textures - when you fight, take off your gloves, etc. It's to match your hands with the cyberface.
There is a separate value to put in cyberface#s, and whatever number you set it to, will be the cyber that shows up on your player. When you set your cyberface value to 0, you'll get a defaulted EA cyberface as you saw (the one with the beard). If you set it to 9999, you'll get another cyber - in the game, cyber #9999 is this guy:
You can put any of the countless hundreds of EA-made NHL cybers on your player, or create your own - with your
actual face.