Lines

How the sheet is read from the ice

For every game the league publishes a shift chart: every player's shifts, with the period, the second he stepped on and the second he stepped off. Put two clubs' charts side by side and every moment of the game has a known set of skaters on the ice for each side, so who played with whom is a matter of adding up seconds. We do that for every pair and every trio of forwards, every pair of defencemen and every group of skaters on a power play. A forward line is the trio that spent the most even-strength time together; once that trio is set aside the next most-used trio is the second line, and so on to four. Defence pairs are found the same way, two at a time. Lines are then ordered by how much the coach used them, so the first line is the trio with the most even-strength ice time a night, not merely the trio that happened to stay together longest. A power-play unit starts from the skater with the most power-play time and adds, one by one, whoever shared the most of it with him, to five; the second unit is built from whoever is left. A player who dressed but was not on any of those combinations for long enough is listed under the sheet as also dressed.

The method has two limits and both are printed rather than hidden. The first is that it only knows a game that has been played: the lines a coach will use tonight are not known until warmups, and a sheet that claims otherwise is a guess with a confident font. Until the first game of the season the sheets here are read from each club's final games of last season, the band above says so, and the rosters have changed since. The second is that a line the coach broke up in the second period is still counted, in proportion to the minutes it played, and in a game with an injury or a blowout the trios can look odd. The three-game and twenty-game windows exist for exactly that reason: a change that survives three games is a decision, and a change in one game may be an accident.

Why the first power-play unit is worth chasing

Most leagues count power-play points as a category of their own, and in a points league a power-play goal or assist usually earns a bonus on top of the goal or the assist. Either way a club's first unit takes the large majority of its power-play minutes, commonly three quarters or more, while the second unit gets the scraps at the end of a penalty. That is why a fourth-line forward who is quietly on the first unit can out-produce a second-line forward who is not, and why the sheet marks each player's unit beside his name and prints his power-play minutes a game. The change strip is the fastest read on the page: a skater onto the first unit is a pickup before the rest of the league notices, and a skater off it is a reason to look for the replacement. Defencemen carry the same rule with more weight, because a defenceman's scoring comes disproportionately from the power play, and the one who quarterbacks the first unit is a different fantasy asset from his partner on the second pair.

Reading a change

The strip above each sheet compares the last game with the one before it and lists every move: a forward up or down a line, a defenceman on a new pair, a skater onto or off a power-play unit, a skater into or out of the lineup. Moves onto the first unit are listed first, then promotions, then demotions. The tracker underneath repeats the same list for all thirty-two clubs, one fold per club, with your club open, so a night's worth of line changes across the league is one page rather than thirty-two beat writers. Read it with the injury report open: a promotion is often somebody else's injury, and it lasts as long as the injury does.

Using it with the schedule planner and the goalie guide

A line sheet answers who is being used; the schedule planner answers how often they get to be used this week. A first-line promotion on a club with four games in the matchup week is a stronger pickup than the same promotion on a club with two, and a light night, the Monday or Wednesday when only a few clubs play, is where a player from a thin slate earns a start he would not otherwise get. The goalie guide is the other half of the daily decision: a club's lines tell you whose skaters to start, and its tandem tells you whether the goalie behind them is in the net tonight or resting on the second half of a back-to-back. Between the three pages the whole daily question is covered: who plays, who plays with whom, and how many nights they play.

What the minutes beside each name mean

The two figures on every tile are the player's even-strength and power-play time on ice, per game across the chosen window, in minutes and seconds. Even-strength time is the better guide to a skater's everyday production, because most goals are scored at even strength and the first line's extra two or three minutes a night compound over a season. Power-play time is the better guide to the category most leagues count separately. A forward with sixteen even-strength minutes and three on the power play is a first-line forward on the first unit and priced accordingly; a forward with fourteen and none is a middle-six skater whose upside depends on a promotion, and this page is where that promotion shows up first. Where a season window covers fewer games than twenty, early in the season, the figures are averages over the games that exist, and the header of the sheet says how many.

Shift charts are read from the league's published game data for every game in the window and refreshed daily on our own feed; names, positions and faces come from the directory. A player whose position the directory does not know is placed among the forwards. If the feed is not available the page says so rather than showing a stale sheet.