What every player is worth in your auction

How your settings become a price

Here is the full calculation, in the order it runs. Multiply the teams by the budget: that sum is every dollar the room will spend, and the board is built to total it exactly. Set one dollar aside for each roster spot in the league, because nobody is won for less than a dollar and every spot must be filled. Then the page seats the league. Each fixed seat (centre, left wing, right wing, defence, goalie) goes to the best players at that position; the shared seats are handed out after, one at a time, wing-only seats first, then any-forward seats, then the utility seats any skater may take, each to whichever eligible position has the strongest player still waiting. The weakest player seated at a position becomes its floor, and every player's value is his projected margin over that floor, with anything below it counted as nothing. The money left after the one-dollar reserve is shared out in proportion to those values and rounded to whole dollars, and the dollars lost to rounding go to the players whose shares sat closest to the next dollar, so nothing is created or lost.

Only as many players as there are roster spots in the league make the board. Twelve teams with sixteen spots each means 192 names, and anyone who does not clear his position's floor is listed at $1. The ribbons that cut across the board mark price cliffs, the points where the next player down costs noticeably less, and the last ribbon gathers the $1 players, who are interchangeable at that price.

The Roster row picks one of three lineup shapes and fills the seat boxes from it. Standard starts two centres, two left wings, two right wings, four defencemen and two goalies. The + Utility shape pools its forwards into nine seats that any centre or winger may fill, then adds five defencemen, one utility skater and two goalies. Deep starts three at each forward position, five defencemen, a utility skater and two goalies. You can edit any box afterwards; the pool is valued for the shape you chose and then re-priced in your browser for the seats you typed.

Market pricing and the plain formula

The Pricing row has two settings, and the board opens on Market. Formula is the calculation above with nothing added. It is steep at the top, because a strict proportion assumes a manager will gladly sink a large slice of his budget into one player, when in a real room that manager still has every other spot to fill from what is left, and that worry tends to stop the bidding on the stars sooner. Market bends the shares before the split: each player's dollars above the minimum are raised to the power 0.625, a step that shrinks big figures more than small ones. Prices at the top come down, the middle rises, nobody changes places, and the total still matches the room's money. That power is one constant shared by our auction boards in every sport. It was not fitted to hockey auction results, since we hold none, so read Market as a sensible shape rather than a measurement, and tap Formula whenever you want the raw proportions. The shareable link remembers which of the two you were looking at.

Goalies: two seats, a large share of the scoring

Goalies sit on the same board as skaters and are measured against their own floor. In a twelve-team league that starts two, the floor is the twenty-fourth goalie the league seats, so a goalie's price is about how far he projects above that man. The position carries more weight than its roster space suggests. In the Categories setting four of the twelve categories belong to goalies (wins, goals-against average, save percentage and shutouts), and in Roto three of the nine do, so the two goalies on your roster decide roughly a third of your result while filling only a couple of roster spots. In Points a goalie scores five for a win and five for a shutout, 0.6 for each save, and loses three for each goal allowed, so volume matters: a goalie who starts most of his team's games piles up saves and wins that a tandem partner with a similar save percentage cannot match. The category settings lean the same way, because goals-against average is weighed by games started and save percentage by shots faced, so a goalie's rates count for more the more he plays. When you weigh a goalie's price, the real question is how many starts he will get. The projection has already answered it, and if his crease is crowded or his job is uncertain, that answer is the softest part of the number.

Points, categories and roto price skaters differently

Changing the Scoring row asks for a fresh pool, because the same skater is worth different money under different rules. Points scores six for a goal, four for an assist, two for each plus-minus point and each power-play point, 0.9 for a shot on goal and one for a blocked shot. Categories counts goals, assists, plus-minus, penalty minutes, power-play points, shots, hits and blocks. Roto keeps goals, assists, power-play points, shots, hits and blocks, dropping plus-minus and penalty minutes, and on the goalie side it drops shutouts. Under either category setting a skater's worth is the sum of how far he stands above or below the pool in each category, in units of the pool's own spread, so a player who leads the league in hits and blocks can carry a real price even if he rarely scores. This is where hockey boards split most sharply: a physical defenceman with modest point totals may sit near the minimum in Points and well above it in Categories, while a winger who shoots constantly holds his value under every setting. In the category settings the Proj column shows that summed score rather than a points total, and the Value column shows its margin over the floor.

Bidding with the board open

Treat each figure as the most a sensible room should pay, then watch what your room actually does. Early on every budget is full and the first big names often sell above their number; later the money thins out and good players slip below it. Nominate expensive players you do not want while budgets are fresh, so other managers spend on them, and hold your own targets back until a few rivals have spent heavily. Keep a running count of every rival's money and empty spots: a team can never bid more than its remaining money minus a dollar for each other spot it still has to fill, so a manager holding $25 with eight spots open is capped at $18 however much he wants a player. The goalie market shows this most clearly. Once most teams have their two starters, fewer managers are bidding on the rest and the remaining goalies usually come cheaper, so if you mean to wait on the position, wait until that point rather than stopping halfway.

Keepers and inflation, worked by hand

The board assumes every player is up for auction. If your league keeps players, a short calculation brings it closer to your room. Add up what the league is charging for every kept player, and separately add up those same players' prices on this board. Take the first total away from the room's money: that is what remains to be spent. Take the second away from the room's money: that is the value left to buy. Divide the first remainder by the second to get an inflation factor, and multiply every remaining price by it. When keepers were kept below their board price the factor comes out above one, because more money is now chasing fewer good players. Download CSV hands you the whole board as a spreadsheet, which makes this quick, and Copy this list puts the same prices in plain text for a group chat.

What the board does not see

Each player is priced at the one position the pool lists for him, so a centre your league also lets you play on the wing earns no credit for that flexibility, even though it helps on draft night. Bench spots are filled from the board at the minimum bid, and the preset roster sizes leave injured-reserve spots out. The values come from season projections, so the games a player is expected to play are built in, but news that broke after the projection date in the band is not. Weekly game counts, crowded schedule weeks and the fantasy playoffs sit outside the price as well. For those, the schedule planner counts games week by week and the goalies page tracks expected starters. The rankings board runs on the same values as these prices, the Mock Draft Trainer rehearses a snake draft against the same pool, and the printable cheat sheet puts the tiers on paper.