Draft Intel

The goalie run, and why it is the number that matters

Every categories league with two goalie seats has the same night. Twenty-four seats to fill, perhaps fifteen goalies who start most nights, and at some point in round three or four somebody takes the second goalie in a row and the room panics. The page finds that round by counting: the first round in which a quarter of the room took a goalie is called the run, and the sentence under the table says which round it was, how many went in it, and how the goalies were spread across the rounds. Beside it, each manager's row shows the first round they took a goalie and how many they took in all. A manager who took two in rounds two and three started the run; one who took a first goalie in round nine was either brave or stuck, and their category balance usually says which. Next year, the manager who started the run will start it again, and knowing that is worth more than any tier list.

Reaches and steals against the draft market

The market is the average draft position from real fantasy hockey drafts, the same number the draft kit and the mock room sort by. For every pick with a market price, the page takes the market position and subtracts the pick number. A positive gap means the manager took the player earlier than the market would have, which is a reach; a negative one means the player fell, which is a steal. The five biggest each way are listed with faces, and every pick carries its own gap in the board below. Two honest limits: a keeper is not a choice, so keepers are left out of the reach count, and a player the market does not rank has no gap at all rather than an invented one. The per-manager tendency sentence folds the average gap in with the goalie timing and the defence timing, the same three clauses the football page writes, in hockey words.

Category balance out of the draft

A points league sums projected points per roster and ranks them. A categories league gets the grid: for each category the league counts, every drafted player's category score from our projections, the same per-player z-score the rankings board and My Team price, is summed per roster, and each roster is ranked in the room for that category. Green cells are the top third of the room, red the bottom third. Read a row and the plan for the season is already visible: the roster that ranks first in hits and blocks and last in save percentage has drafted a punt whether it meant to or not, and the schedule planner and the streamers page are where that roster goes next. Categories the league spells in a way the pool does not price are left out of the grid and named, never guessed.

Where the draft comes from

Hockey leagues live on Yahoo and ESPN, and both are read through our own server for a league you linked in Front Office, under your own login: Yahoo through its documented draft results resource, ESPN through the league document its own draft recap reads. Only a league you are a member of can be read, and only by you. Each pick is matched to our player pages by id where a crosswalk exists and by name where it does not; a pick that cannot be matched keeps the name your league gave it and is counted in the note under the league name, so you always know how much of the draft the numbers cover. Manager names are the team names your league uses. No account id, no email and no avatar leaves the platform.

Keeper leagues and auctions

A keeper league's draft starts with the keepers already placed, which distorts every gap: a round-one seat that is really a keeper slot is not a decision anyone made this year. The page flags keepers where the platform reports them and leaves them out of the reach and steal lists. An auction league arrives with a cost on every pick instead of a snake position, and the board shows the dollar figure; the gap column still measures against the market's draft position, which is a weaker comparison for an auction, so read it as a hint rather than a verdict. Games per week, off-night schedules and injured-reserve seats are invisible to a draft record, which is exactly why the season starts on the schedule planner and not here.

After you have read it

Three buttons take the draft somewhere. The mock room opens with this league's roster shape, its size and your seat, so the reps are against a room the right shape. Grade this draft sends the picks into Grade My Draft, where every roster gets the four-component report card. Open it in the companion replays the draft onto the companion board, useful for a league that drafts in stages or for reading a friend's draft on a second screen. There is no bye week in hockey, so the football page's check on stacked weeks off has no counterpart here; everything else, the tendency sentence and the room's habits, is the same maths in a different sport.