Evaluate My Fantasy Hockey Team

What the grid is measuring

Each cell is your starters' summed z-score in one category, next to the average starting lineup's total. A z-score is a player's distance from the middle of the projected pool in that category, in standard deviations, so a lineup total of plus six in shots means your starters are, together, six standard deviations of shooting above the middle of the pool. The league average is the same sum over every starting seat in the league, divided by the number of teams. It sits above zero in every column, because starters are better than the pool they are drawn from, which is why a lineup can be above zero and still below average. The difference between the two is the number that matters, and the tint follows the rank: green for a column you would expect to win most weeks, red for one you would expect to lose.

The rank is an estimate, and says so

No page can read your real league without a login, so the rank is judged against a synthetic one. The league's projected starters are dealt out into as many lineups as your league has teams, in snake order of value, the way a sensible draft would distribute them, and your total is placed among those lineups' totals. It is an estimate of where a lineup like yours stands in a league like yours, never a reading of the actual teams you play, which is why the page says "about 3rd of 12" and not "3rd". A real league has managers who reached for goalies and managers who punted hits, and the synthetic one is smoother than that. Read the rank as a direction and the difference as the size.

Why the goalie columns swing it

Two of the twelve starting seats in the common roster are goalies, and under the default category set four of the ten columns are theirs: wins, goals-against average, save percentage and shutouts. A skater's value is spread across hundreds of players who are nearly interchangeable at the margin; a goalie's is concentrated in the thirty or so who take most of their club's starts, and a league that starts two on every roster seats nearly all of them. So a roster carrying a true number one reads well in four columns at once and a roster carrying two platoon men reads poorly in the same four. The crease card is there to say which you have: projected starts against the league's, each goalie's role in his tandem, and the starts expected in the week ahead when the feed is readable. Every start named there is expected; the club confirms at the morning skate.

Punting as a plan, not an accident

A roster that is last in hits and blocks is not necessarily a bad roster; it may be a skill roster that should stop pretending. The punt suggestion names the two weakest skater columns, and the punt toggle in the picker lets you concede them: the columns stay in the grid, greyed, and leave the lineup total and the gap list, so the rest of the page reads the team you are actually building. Goalie columns are never suggested, because each is a quarter of a goalie's worth and conceding one usually means conceding the crease. Whether to punt is your call; the page only says where the weakness is and what the roster looks like without it.

Games this week

Lineups in hockey are daily and clubs play between two and four games in a fantasy week, so a roster's output in any given week is as much about the calendar as the players. The games card counts how many of your starting skaters play four times, three times, or fewer this week, adds the games up and compares the total with what the average lineup gets. A roster two games short of the average is starting the week behind before a puck is dropped, and the names listed under two games are the ones to bench for a streamer with a fuller slate. The schedule planner lays the whole week out by club.

The gaps and the names that fix them

The three lowest-ranked columns are the gaps, and under each are the three players outside your roster who move that column most among the players a waiver claim could reach: those rostered in fewer than half of leagues, by the roster share the draft market publishes. A player at 30 per cent rostered with a deep green hits cell is the kind of pickup that turns a last-place column into a middling one for nothing. Whether he is actually available in your league the page cannot know, which is why it says free-agent-shaped and not free agent. When no roster share is published the list falls back to the players the league board leaves unseated, and says so.

What it never claims

The page is redraft only, on season projections. It never claims a specific player is available in your league, that a goalie will get the net on a given night, or that the synthetic rank is your standing. A player our sources have not projected cannot be scored and is taken off the list with a note, never counted as zero. Under the points format the grid is empty and the lineup total stands in for it, read the same way against the average lineup. For the pick-by-pick decisions that build a roster in the first place, the category board and the printable cheat sheet rank the pool in the same categories.