Schedule grid

Eighty-two games across roughly twenty-six weeks averages a little over three a week, so the spread on this grid is narrow in the abstract: most clubs play three or four, some play two, a few play five. It is not narrow where it lands. A club with four games gives a roster slot twice the work of a club with two, and that ratio applies to everything the player produces — shots, hits, blocks and power-play points as much as goals.

The advantage belongs to the slot rather than to the player. You cannot make a winger score more; you can decide which winger holds the slot in a week his club plays four times. That is why the grid is read down a column rather than across a row — the question is which clubs are busy in the window you care about, and the roster move follows from the answer.

What the totals cannot tell you is that those games are equal. This page counts fixtures and nothing else: no strength of schedule, no back-to-backs, no travel, and no note that three of the four are against the best defensive clubs in the league. Games are opportunity, not production. A four-game week of fourth-line minutes is still fourth-line minutes, and the grid will happily put that club's whole roster above a two-game week that should beat it.

The off-night threshold is derived from the nights inside the window you asked for: a night is light when it holds at or below the median number of games among the nights in that range that have any hockey, and strictly fewer than the busiest night in the range. Widen from one week to four and the comparison set changes with it, so the same Friday can be an off-night in one view and not in the other. That is the definition working, not the data moving.

Which makes the width a real choice rather than a display preference. A waiver claim you are making on a Sunday night is a one-week question, and the one-week threshold describes the week you will actually be setting lineups in. Whether to hold a player through a month, or what to ask for in a trade, is a four- or eight-week question, and the wider threshold is the right one because it is the average night across the period you would own him.

A fixed list of weeknights has no such property, which is the argument for deriving it at all. "Mondays and Wednesdays are off-nights" is a summary of one era's national television contract; it comes apart around the holidays, the All-Star break and the compressed weeks either side of the trade deadline — the weeks a manager most needs the number, and the weeks a hardcoded rule would go on printing a confident wrong answer.

One behaviour to expect from a derived threshold: a window in which every night is equally busy has no off-nights at all, and this page says so rather than calling all of them light. A definition that can label the busiest night in a range quiet is not a definition of a quiet night.

A week cell answers how much work a club gives a roster slot in that week. The total answers it across the whole window, which is the number for a hold-or-drop decision rather than a start-or-sit one. The off-night column answers something different in kind: not how much, but how easily it fits — how many of those games land on nights when your lineup is not already full.

The shading is emphasis and carries no separate meaning. It is scaled to the busiest team-week in this particular grid, so a dark cell in a compressed December window and a dark cell in a window straddling the All-Star break are not the same number of games. The count is the answer; when you compare two grids, compare counts and not colours. Hovering a cell lists the fixtures behind it, which is where a heavy week turns out to be four at home or four on the road.

It counts fixtures, not lineups. Nothing here knows a player is a healthy scratch, has been sent down, is splitting a crease, or is hurt. Four games is four opportunities for whoever dresses; which of your players that is remains your judgement, and confirmed lineups come from a beat reporter at the morning skate — a feed this site does not carry and does not approximate.

A postponed game is removed from the night it was scheduled for and reappears on the night it is eventually played, once the league reschedules it. That is the only honest treatment — the alternative counts one game twice — but it means this grid and the same grid a month later can disagree about a week in the past. A screenshot of this page records what was scheduled at the time, not what happened.

Only regular-season games are counted, on the Eastern game day, which is why a busy September night of exhibitions fills the nightly slate and leaves this page empty. And if your league sets lineups weekly rather than daily, half of this page is not for you: the totals still matter, because four games against two is a genuine doubling of opportunity, and the off-night column does not, because you never leave a slot empty.