Fantasy hockey glossary

Every statistic and abbreviation used on this site, in plain English — including what each one is actually good for in fantasy, and where it misleads. How the rankings themselves are built is in the methodology.

Fantasy concepts

VORP — value over replacement player: How much more fantasy value a player produces than the best player at his position who is freely available. It exists because raw totals hide positional scarcity: forty points from a defenceman is worth more than forty points from a centre when replacement-level defencemen are scarcer. VORP is the value NHL Fantasy Hub sorts its rankings by.
Replacement level: The production you could get at a position for nothing, typically from waivers. It is calculated as the Nth-best player at that position, where N is the number of roster slots at that position multiplied by the number of teams in the league. In a 12-team league starting two centres, the 24th-best centre sets the replacement level for centres. It is not a fixed number: change the league size or the roster shape and it moves.
Z-score: How many standard deviations above or below the average a player sits in a given category. Categories leagues use z-scores rather than raw totals so that categories with a wide spread between players count for more than categories where everyone is bunched together — being elite at a tightly-packed category wins you less than being elite at a category nobody else provides.
Points league: A fantasy format where each statistic is worth a fixed number of points — for example three points per goal and two per assist — and teams are ranked by total points. Because the weights vary from league to league, the same player can be substantially more or less valuable depending on the scoring settings.
Categories league: A fantasy format where teams are compared category by category — goals, assists, hits and so on — rather than by a single total. A player who is excellent in one scarce category can be more valuable here than a player with better overall totals spread across common categories.
Tier: A group of players between whom the difference in value is small, bounded by a meaningful drop to the next group. Tiers matter at a draft because they answer the question a ranked list cannot: whether waiting a round still gets you an equivalent player, or whether this pick is the last of its kind.
Streaming: Adding and dropping players week to week to take advantage of schedule, rather than holding a fixed roster. A streamed player is usually chosen because his team plays more games than average in the coming week, or plays on nights when few other teams do, so he fills a roster slot that would otherwise sit empty.

Skater statistics

GP — games played: The number of games in which the player appeared. A player who dressed but took no shift still records a game played.
G — goals: Goals scored by the player in the situation covered by the stat line — regular season and playoff totals are tracked separately on this site.
A — assists: Assists credited to the player. The NHL credits at most two assists per goal, to the last two teammates to touch the puck before the scorer.
P — points: Goals plus assists. The most common single measure of offensive production, and the base scoring category in most fantasy leagues.
PPP — power-play points: Goals and assists recorded while the player's team has a man advantage. Valuable in fantasy beyond their raw count because power-play time is concentrated in a small number of players per team, making it a strong signal of a player's role rather than just his output.
SHP — short-handed points: Goals and assists recorded while the player's team is a man down. Rare, and scored generously in many leagues precisely because of that scarcity.
SOG — shots on goal: Shots that would have entered the net had the goaltender not stopped them. Blocked and missed shots are excluded. Often used in fantasy as a more stable signal than goals, since shot volume fluctuates less than shooting percentage.
HIT — hits: Body checks credited to the player. Recorded by arena scorers, which makes the count somewhat venue-dependent — the same play is not always scored identically in every building.
BLK — blocked shots: Opposition shot attempts the player blocked with his body or stick. A category dominated by defencemen, and often the reason a low-scoring defenceman carries real fantasy value.
PIM — penalty minutes: Minutes assessed against the player in penalties. Scored positively in some leagues as a proxy for physical play and negatively in others.
+/− — plus-minus: Even-strength and short-handed goals scored by the player's team while he was on the ice, minus those conceded. Heavily dependent on teammates and on goaltending, which is why it is one of the noisiest categories in common use.
TOI — time on ice: Total ice time, usually presented per game. One of the most reliable indicators of a player's role, because coaches allocate minutes deliberately even when results fluctuate.

Goaltender statistics

SV% — save percentage: The proportion of shots faced that the goaltender stopped, shown as a decimal such as .915. A goaltender who has faced no shots has no save percentage at all — that is a genuine absence rather than a zero, and NHL Fantasy Hub leaves it blank rather than recording 0.000, which would rank him last instead of excluding him.
GAA — goals against average: Goals conceded per sixty minutes of play. Unlike save percentage it is affected by how many shots the goaltender faces, so a goaltender on a strong defensive team can post a good GAA with ordinary stopping ability.
SO — shutouts: Games in which the goaltender conceded no goals and played the entire game. A high-variance category in fantasy, since a shutout depends as much on the team in front as on the goaltender.
SA — shots against: Shots on goal faced by the goaltender. Useful as context for save percentage: the same percentage means something different across 20 shots than across 40.
Workload share: A goaltender's games played as a fraction of his team's games in the same season — the measure of whether he is the starter, the backup, or in a timeshare. In most fantasy formats it matters more than rate statistics, because a .905 save percentage across 55 starts is worth more than .915 across 22.

Schedule and planning

Off-night: A night when relatively few NHL teams play. It matters in daily-lineup leagues because a player active on a quiet night is far more likely to fit an open roster slot, while on a busy night you may have more players than slots. NHL Fantasy Hub derives off-nights from the actual schedule in the range being viewed — at or below the median game count for that range and strictly below the busiest night — rather than assuming fixed nights of the week, because which nights are quiet varies week to week.
Games per week: How many games a team plays in a given week. In leagues with daily lineups, a player on a four-game team simply has more opportunities to accumulate statistics than one on a two-game team, which is why schedule is a genuine input to start-and-sit decisions rather than a tiebreaker.
Roster stint: A dated spell during which a player appeared for one team. NHL Fantasy Hub derives these from the games a player actually played, which makes them a lower bound on roster membership rather than an exact record: a player acquired at the trade deadline who does not dress for two weeks appears to have arrived later than he did, because an appearance is the only dated evidence public NHL data provides for past seasons.

Common questions are answered in the FAQ.