Grade My Draft

The four components, and their weights

Pick value is the average gap, in picks, between where each of your players was taken and where the market had him: a skater taken at pick 40 whose draft position is 28 counts twelve in your favour, and one taken twelve picks early counts twelve against. That average is placed on a scale where zero, the structural middle of a snake draft, is a plain C. Starting lineup is the projected value of the best legal lineup the roster can ice, ranked against every other team in the league. Depth is the same ranking for the bench. Balance starts at 100 and loses 25 for every required starting seat left empty at the end of the draft and 10 for every position where you drafted more than three players past the number you can start. The weights are 35, 35, 15 and 15, written on the methodology page, and the letter is the weighted sum.

Steals and reaches, pick by pick

Under the league table every pick is listed with its market rank. A player taken twelve or more picks after his draft position is marked as value, one taken twelve or more picks before it is marked as a reach, and everything inside that band reads as on price. Twelve is deliberately wide: the market itself moves by a few picks from draft to draft, and calling a pick a reach because it landed four spots early would be reading noise. A player the market has no number for is marked as having no price, and the page counts how many of a team's picks the market priced, because that count is what the overall grade rests on.

Why the market is the yardstick

The market is average draft position from real drafts in your scoring format, the same order the draft kit shows and the mock room drafts from. It is the yardstick rather than our projections for one reason: a grade should measure the decision against what was knowable in the room, and the room knew the market. A pick made well above it is a reach on this page even if it turns out to be right, and a goalie taken in round two when the market had him in round five is a reach even if he wins forty games, because the grade is scoring the draft, not October. The projections come in through the lineup and depth components, where what a roster can actually produce is the question.

What a hockey grade counts that a football one does not

There is no bye-week term in Balance here, because hockey has no bye week, and every position on the board is priced, goalies included, so no seat is excluded from the pick-value average the way a kicker is. That means a hockey grade is not comparable to a football grade from the same site. What the hockey grade does see is the goalie run: a manager who took two goalies in rounds two and three will often show a reach on one or both and a strong starting lineup, and the two components are meant to pull against each other. A manager who waited and ended up with two tandem goalies shows the opposite, on-price picks and a weaker lineup. Neither is wrong yet; the grade is telling you which bet each of them made.

What the grade cannot see

It cannot see games per week, so a bench built for the light nights grades the same as one that was not. Keepers are invisible to it too, and they distort the market for everyone, as is an injured-reserve seat, which your platform fills with players the grade counts as bench. And it cannot grade a roster whose picks are not all on the market: if a pick cannot be matched to a priced player, the overall grade is withheld rather than guessed, with the lineup, depth and balance tiles still shown.

After the grade

The grade ends on draft night. From there the schedule planner shows how many games each of your clubs plays this week, and the injury report tells you who is out before the lineup call is made. Share the card with the league; the manager with the worst grade will want to argue, and the argument is the point.