FIELD GUIDE

The fantasy playoffs are won on the schedule as much as on the roster

Most head-to-head hockey leagues settle the title over the last three or four weeks of the regular season, one matchup a week, and in those weeks the only games that count are the ones your players actually play. A club with eleven games across the playoff weeks gives its skaters eleven chances to score for you; a club with eight gives its skaters eight, and no amount of talent makes up the three missing nights. Managers who look at the playoff calendar in February, while the trade deadline and the waiver wire are still open, are the ones who arrive in March with a lineup that plays every night.

This page is that look. It ranks every club by its games in your league’s playoff weeks, shows how many fall on light nights, counts the back-to-backs, and lists the light nights themselves so you can see which of your clubs plays when almost nobody else does.

Read the rest

Setting your playoff weeks

Leagues differ. The default here is the last three full fantasy weeks of the schedule, which is the shape both major platforms use for a six-team playoff; a four-team bracket runs two weeks, and some leagues start a week earlier or finish before the final week to avoid the clubs that rest players once their seeding is set. The two pickers set your league’s own range, up to six weeks, and the range is written into the address, so the link you copy opens the same ranking for your whole league. Check your league’s settings page for the playoff start week before you trust the default.

How the ranking is built

Each club’s games inside the range are read from the fantasy-week schedule, the same feed the schedule planner draws its grid from, so the two pages never disagree. Clubs are ranked first by total games, because a game is a game; then by games on light nights, because a game on a night when most of your opponent’s bench is dark is worth more than one on a fourteen-game Saturday when everyone plays; then by fewer back-to-backs, because the second half of a back-to-back usually goes to the backup goalie and often to tired legs. Clubs with the same three figures share a rank. The bar beside the total is the club’s games as a share of the best schedule in the range, so the gap between the top and the bottom is visible without reading every number.

Light nights and why they matter more in the playoffs

A light night is a date when the league plays fewer than eight games; the figure is adjustable, and the planner uses the same one. In the regular season a light night is a streaming opportunity. In the playoffs it is closer to a free win: a matchup week is decided by category totals or points, and on a Wednesday with four games the manager whose roster has three skaters and a goalie playing banks a night’s production while his opponent banks nothing. The tiles under the ranking list every light night inside your range with the clubs that play it, and the clubs you mark above are highlighted, so you can see at once whether your roster is built for the quiet nights of March or whether it needs a trade.

Back-to-backs and the goalie problem

The back-to-back column counts the sets of consecutive-day games a club plays in the range. For skaters a back-to-back is two games, and two games is good. For goalies it is different: nearly every club starts its backup on one half of a back-to-back, so a starter on a club with three sets in the playoff weeks will miss about three of his club’s games. Read this column with the goalie tandem guide, which shows how each club handled its back-to-backs last season and which goalie it turned to, before you decide which goalie to carry into the playoffs.

Using the ranking before the deadline

The practical use of this page is in February, when the fantasy trade deadline and the last waiver moves fall. Sort your own roster’s clubs against the ranking: a good player on a club near the bottom is a candidate to move for a slightly worse player on a club near the top, because the extra games close the gap and the light-night games more than close it. The same is true in reverse for a manager who is already out of contention and can sell March games for a keeper. The ranking is not a projection of who will be good in March; it says how often each club takes the ice, and leaves the judgement of who to start to you and to the board.

What this page does not know

It does not know your league’s playoff weeks, which is why they are set above, and it does not know your roster, which is why the clubs are marked by hand. The schedule can change: a postponed game moves from one week to another and the ranking moves with it when the feed refreshes. Before the season opens the ranking is drawn from the published calendar and is as final as the calendar is. The range, the light threshold and the marked clubs are all in the address.

The fantasy-week schedule is our own feed, rebuilt daily from the league calendar. If it is unavailable the page says so rather than showing a ranking built on nothing.

Playoff Schedules

Light nights in the playoff weeks