MUSTDRAFThockey

BY DIVISION

Standings

Free, no account Scores
Every club by conference and division, sorted by points, with games played, wins, regulation-or-overtime losses, overtime losses and points percentage.
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FIELD GUIDE

How to read hockey standings as a fantasy manager

The standings tell you which clubs are winning; they do not tell you which clubs are good for fantasy, and the two come apart more often in hockey than in any other sport. A club that wins low-scoring games behind a hot goalie produces one fantasy asset and starves its skaters. A club losing 5-4 every other night is a nightmare for its own fans and a gift to anyone who owns its first line. Read the points column as a question about how a club is winning, never as a verdict on its players.

Where the standings do matter directly is the goalie. A club near the top of its division starts its number one more, chases fewer games and wins more of the ones it plays, and wins are a category in almost every format. A club out of the race by February rests its starter and gives the backup the second half of back-to-backs, which is when a cheap goalie on a good team quietly becomes the best pickup on the wire.

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The columns

GP is games played, W the wins, L the losses in regulation, OTL the losses in overtime or a shootout, which still earn a point. PTS is the total, two for a win and one for an overtime loss, and it is what the divisions are sorted by. P% is points earned divided by points available, and it is the fairer figure early in the season when clubs have played uneven schedules; a club at .650 with three games in hand is ahead of a club at .600 with more points on the board.

Using this beside the other pages

When a club near the bottom of its division starts selling at the deadline, its remaining skaters inherit minutes and power-play time; the player pages show whose ice time moved up. When a club near the top starts resting players in April, the schedule planner shows how many games are left to rest through. Neither of those calls can be made from the standings alone, but both start here.

Standings are rebuilt from our own feed after each night's games. If they are unavailable the page says so rather than showing an old table.