What every player is worth in your auction

The arithmetic, in six steps

The room holds teams times budget, and that is the only money there is. One dollar is reserved for every roster spot in the league, because nobody is bought for less than the minimum bid. The starting seats are then counted league wide from the lineup you set: the fixed seats first, then any utility seat, one at a time to the best player still unseated. The last starter at each position sets that position's line, and a player's auction value is what he projects above that man, floored at zero. What is left is split across the pool in proportion to those values, rounded to whole dollars with the remainder handed to the largest fractions first, so the board adds up to the room's money exactly.

Market and Formula

Formula is those six steps with nothing added, and it is steeper at the top than any room you will sit in. Proportional value puts roughly half a budget on the best player in the pool; real rooms stop well short of that, because the manager who spends half his money on one skater still has fifteen seats to fill. Market, the setting the board opens on, reproduces that spread: each player's dollars above the $1 floor are raised to a power below one before the pot is split, and the same rounding runs again. A power below one pulls big numbers down harder, so the top comes in and the middle rises. The order never changes, zero stays $1, and the board still totals the room's money.

Goalies are on this board, and that changes the money

Every skater and every goalie in the projected pool is priced here, and in a league that seats two of them the twenty-four starting goalies in a twelve-team room are a real block of value. The line is the twenty-fifth goalie, the best one nobody has to start, and the gap between a workhorse who gets sixty starts and that man is wide. So the goalie column takes a larger share of the pot than a mixed ranking would suggest: the scarcity of the position, written in dollars. If your league runs a minimum number of goalie starts per week, two on Yahoo's default settings, the tandem goalie who splits a net is worth less to you than his projection says, because a start you cannot count on does not clear the minimum.

Points, categories and roto price the same player differently

The projection underneath each price depends on the scoring you pick. In a points league the line is scored with Yahoo's default weights: a goal is six, an assist four, a plus-minus point and a power-play point two each, a shot on goal 0.9 and a blocked shot one; a goalie earns five for a win and for a shutout, 0.6 a save, and loses three for every goal against. In a categories league there is no total to score, so a player's worth is how far he moves each of the league's categories relative to the rest of the pool, added up across the eight skater categories ESPN uses by default or the six a roto pool counts. A third-pair defenceman who blocks 180 shots and throws 200 hits is worth little in points and a good deal in categories, and his price moves accordingly.

Reading a price when the bidding starts

Treat the number as the ceiling for a rational room, not a bid to make. Early nominations usually go over it, because every budget is full; late in the night the same tier goes under it, because the money is gone. A room that has overpaid through its first twenty players is a room where the middle of the board will be cheap, and the middle is where a hockey roster is won: second-tier defencemen play as many nights as the first-round names.

What this cannot see

It cannot see your league's keepers, whose discounts leave more money chasing a smaller pool, or a room that runs hot early. Injuries change a price the day they are announced. The gap between the price here and the bidding in front of you is the signal. The values underneath are the same ones on the rankings board; the Mock Draft Trainer rehearses a snake room, and the printable cheat sheet puts the same tiers on paper.