How the NHL draft game works

Every NHL regular season since 1917-18, from the NHL's own public stats. Skaters need 100 games to be rated on a career and goalies 50. A skater's position is the one he played most. Clubs that moved keep their history, so the Quebec Nordiques count for the Avalanche and the Hartford Whalers for the Hurricanes; clubs that no longer exist stay on a player's card but have no pool of their own. Seattle and Utah are too new to fill eight rosters with their own players, so they have no franchise pool yet.

A skater's season is his points per game divided by the 90th percentile among regulars (40 or more games) that season, forwards against forwards and defensemen against defensemen. That puts a 1980s scorer and a 2010s scorer on one scale. Seasons under 60 games are scaled down.

A goalie's season is the league's goals-against average divided by his (higher is better), plus 0.15 times his share of games won. Seasons under 45 games are scaled down. Save percentage is not used because shots were not counted in the early decades.

The average of his five best seasons, times 0.8 plus 0.2 for staying power (full credit at 1,000 games), ranked within his position. Awards are not part of the score: the stats feed does not carry them.

A pool rates its own players from that order: the best at a position is 99, and the rating falls by 8 times the natural log of one plus his rank divided by how many a lineup starts (2 centers, 2 left wings, 2 right wings, 4 defensemen, 1 goalie), never below 40.

The This season pool is every player on an NHL roster now, rated per game on his 2024-25 and 2025-26 seasons with 2025-26 counted double, scaled down until he has 60 games across the two. That form is 85 percent of the score and the career score 15 percent.

A team's strength is its players' ratings weighted by slot:

An 82-game season: 41 rounds of two games against one opponent on a round robin schedule. Both scores are drawn around 3.1 goals; each point of strength difference moves the stronger team's expected goals up 0.045 and the other's down 0.045, home ice moves them 0.1 each way, and each score varies by a standard deviation of 1.7. A tie goes to overtime, worth a goal to the winner, who is more likely to be the stronger team. The top four play best-of-seven semifinals and a final (the top two in a league of two or three).

The box scores are simulated, not real: each goal goes to a skater by line and rating, with up to two assists, and the goalie faces about 30 shots. The MVP is the best simulated season, scaled up by how often his team won.

Statistics, positions, clubs and current rosters come from the NHL's public stats services (api.nhle.com and api-web.nhle.com), and the photos are the NHL's own headshots from a player's last season; careers that ended before the late 1990s, and anyone without a photo, show a plain silhouette.