FIELD GUIDE

Why a hockey trade needs a ledger and not a number

In a points league a trade is arithmetic: add up what each side receives, and the bigger pile wins. In a category league, which is how most private hockey pools are scored, the arithmetic does not exist. A week is won by taking more of the ten or twelve categories than your opponent, so a hits-and-blocks defenceman and a thirty-goal winger are not two amounts of the same thing, they are two different things, and a trade that sends one for the other is a trade of columns. You give up goals and power-play points, you get hits and blocks, and whether that is good depends on which columns you were losing before the trade.

This page therefore answers in columns. It scores every player on both sides in every category your league counts, sums each side, and shows the ledger: who takes each category, by how much, and the net across all of them. The verdict is written the same way, in the categories gained and given up, because that is the sentence a category manager actually needs.

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Why z-scores

Goals, shots and hits are counted in different units and spread across the league very differently. A gap of forty hits between two forwards is ordinary; a gap of forty goals is the whole league. To compare a player's contribution in one column with his contribution in another, each column has to be put on the same scale, and the scale the category tools have used for years is the z-score: how far a player's projected total sits from the average of the pool, measured in standard deviations of that pool. A z of plus one in shots means he is one standard deviation above the pool in shots; a z of minus half in penalty minutes means he is a bit below. The pool here is the players our projections price for a league of your size and position rule, the same pool that builds the category board, so a player's z on this page is the number beside him there. A lower-is-better category, goals-against average, is turned before it is shown, so a good goalie always reads as a positive figure and the ledger never needs a footnote about direction.

What the net means, and when it is too close

The net is the sum of the differences down the ledger: Team A's total z minus Team B's, over the categories still in play. A net of plus one says that, spread across the categories, Team A comes out about one standard deviation of one category ahead, which over a ten-category ledger is a real but modest edge. The stamp calls the trade too close when the net is inside a quarter of a z either way, because our projections are one model's opinion and a quarter of a z is inside what that opinion could be wrong by. It is not a coin flip in that case; it is a trade that the columns, not the total, should decide. Look down the ledger and ask which side gains the categories you have been losing on Sunday nights.

The punt case

Many category managers punt: they give up on one or two categories on purpose, usually penalty minutes, hits or plus-minus, and build a roster that wins the rest. For a punting manager a trade that loses a punted column costs nothing, and a trade analyzer that counts it is scoring the wrong game. The punt toggle in the picker keeps a punted category on the ledger, greyed out and struck through so you can still see what changes hands, and drops it from the net and the verdict. The same toggles are written into the link, so a trade you send to a league mate opens on your punts, and if he runs a different strategy he can turn them off and see his own answer without retyping the players.

Two for one, and the seat that opens

The most common trade in a category league is two players for one, and the most common mistake in judging it is to add up two values against one. The side that gives two players gets a roster seat back and fills it from the waiver wire, so the honest comparison is one player plus the best free agent at the position that opened, against two players. The page does that. Our pool publishes a replacement level for every position, the value of the next player available at that position in a league of your size, and the ledger adds it to the shorter side as its own line, named as an open seat and never hidden inside a player's number. It uses the position of the least valuable player that side gave away, since that is the seat that actually opens. The roster-shape line above the ledger says what each side takes on and sends out by position, so you can see a trade that leaves you with three centres and no right wing before the platform tells you.

Goalie starts, the hidden asset

A goalie's four categories, wins, goals-against average, save percentage and shutouts, are all earned in the crease and nowhere else, and three of the four only accumulate when he starts. Two goalies with similar rate stats are worth very different amounts if one starts sixty games and the other thirty-five, which is why the roster-shape line counts projected goalie starts in and out. A trade that swaps a starter for a backup with a better save percentage is a trade that gives up starts, and the ledger will show the wins and shutouts columns moving the wrong way even when the percentage column looks fine. Read it beside the goalie tandem guide, which shows how each club's starts actually split last season and who we expect in net this week.

What this page does not know

Every number here is ours. There is no crowd-sourced trade market for hockey the way there is for football, so this page cannot tell you what other managers would pay, only what our projections say the players are worth in your categories. It does not know your roster or your opponent's, so it cannot tell you whether the categories you gain are the ones you needed, and it does not know your league's trade deadline, its roster limits or a commissioner's veto. The projections are season totals and know nothing about this week's schedule; a player on a two-game week and one on a four-game week carry the same z here, which is right for a trade and wrong for a Monday lineup, where the streamers page and the schedule planner take over. Position eligibility is read from our directory and can lag a platform's own updates by a few days, so a winger the platform has just made centre-eligible may still show as a wing on the roster-shape line. The players, the format, the categories and the punts are all written into the address, so the link opens the same ledger for anyone you send it to.

The pool is priced by our own valuation from our projections, refreshed daily. If it is unavailable the page says so rather than showing a stale ledger.

Hockey Trade Analyzer

Team A receivesplayers going to Team A

Team B receivesplayers going to Team B