Printable Fantasy Hockey Cheat Sheet

What the value number means

Under the Categories and Roto formats the number beside each player is his summed z-score: in every category in play, how far his projected line sits from the middle of the projected pool, in standard deviations, added up across the categories you left unpunted. A player at plus two in shots and plus one in hits carries the same three units as a player at plus three in goals, which is the honest way to compare a grinder with a sniper when your matchup is decided column by column. Skater categories are measured against skaters and goalie categories against goalies, save percentage is weighted by projected shots against and goals-against average by projected starts, and goals-against average is flipped so that a bigger number always means a better player. Under the Points format the number is the stat line scored with the Yahoo default weights: six per goal, four per assist, two per power-play point, two per unit of plus-minus, 0.9 per shot, one per block; five per win, 0.6 per save, five per shutout, minus three per goal against. The small grey figure at the end of each row is the player's overall rank on the full board, so you can see at a glance whether the third centre on the sheet is the 15th player overall or the 60th.

Where a tier line is drawn

Each position column is tiered on its own values. A break lands where the drop between two neighbours is a real cliff against the drops around it: at least three times the typical gap in the twenty rows either side, and never smaller than a floor so the bottom of a column does not splinter into tiers of one. The tier row says what the drop is, in the sheet's own units, so a tier that ends with a drop of 0.9 is a wall and a tier that ends with a drop of 0.15 is barely a line. Every column runs half again as deep as the starters a league of your size seats at that position, which is where a draft actually runs out of players worth a pick, and the sheet stops there rather than printing a fourth page of names nobody will roster.

The goalie column is the one to watch

Hockey drafts have one run that football drafts do not: the goalie run. Twelve teams starting two goalies each is twenty-four seats, and the pool of goalies who start most of their club's games is smaller than that. Once it starts, the goalie column can empty in a round and a half. Keep it in view in the middle rounds. When the last goalie in a tier is gone and the next tier is tandem goalies who split a net, the choice is whether to pay now or to plan on carrying three goalies and streaming the third. Most clubs split the crease more evenly than a season ago, and the sheet's goalie values read season totals of wins, shutouts and starts, so a projected 60-start goalie who becomes a 40-start goalie in a tandem loses a third of his value at once, and a club that signs or trades for a second starter in September changes two goalies' start counts in one move. Before the draft, read the goalie tandem guide for who actually gets the net on each club and how each tandem splits its back-to-backs, and mark the sheet accordingly. A categories league scores a goalie in four columns and a points league in one; the sheet has already made that adjustment, so the goalie tiers you print for one format will not match the other.

Two position rules, one sheet

The two big platforms disagree about what a forward is. One lists every skater as a centre, a left wing or a right wing, starts two of each and moves a player's eligibility during the season; the other pools the three into a single forward slot and starts nine. The position rule chips switch the sheet between the two: under the split rule page one carries three forward columns and under the pooled rule it carries one long forward column split across the page, with defence and goalies on page two either way. The values themselves do not change with the rule, because a category is a category whichever slot a player fills, but the depth of each column does, and so does the roster the replacement level is priced on.

Reading the sheet across an 84-game season

Scoring on the sheet is a season total, and a hockey week is not a fixed thing: some clubs play four times, some twice, and the difference is the difference between two starters. In the last five rounds the gap between neighbours inside a tier is small enough that the schedule can settle it. Cross off every player as he is taken, by anyone, not only your own picks, so that by round nine the question of which tiers still hold a live name is answered in one look. If your league carries keepers, as many office pools do, settle them first and strike the kept players before the first pick, or the top of every column is fiction.

When to put the sheet down

Paper cannot see your roster. If you hold four defencemen and one winger in round five, the best value in the defence column is not your pick, and the sheet will not say so. It cannot see injuries announced after it was printed, which is why the build date is on every page and why the morning of the draft beats the week before. Light weeks are the other blind spot; the schedule planner deserves a second sheet of paper. If you would rather have the crossing-off done for you, the draft companion is this same board with the taken players removed as you tick them. Export CSV writes the same order, with a column per category, to a plain file you can open in a spreadsheet; the values behind it are explained on the methodology page.