Streaming finder

Work an example. A skater producing 0.90 of fantasy value per game whose club plays four times, none of them light, scores 3.60. A skater at 0.75 per game whose club also plays four times, three of them light, lands close enough that the board prints the same number. Reading them as equals is the honest output — it is not claiming the first will outproduce the second, it is saying that on the two facts it holds, a season rate and a fixture count, it cannot separate them.

So the tie is broken with the columns and not with the score. Games, off-night games and value per game sit beside the composite at the same weight, and every one of them is sortable. A reader who thinks the off-night bonus is nonsense can sort by games and get a pure schedule board; a reader who thinks next week's fixtures barely matter can sort by value per game and get the season rankings back. The composite is one defensible ordering of three facts, not a verdict on them.

Read the number as a ranking key rather than as a quantity. It carries the units of fantasy points and sits in a column sorted descending, which is what a projection looks like everywhere else on the internet. A 4.1 above a 3.6 means the first player is ahead on the two inputs shown; it is not a claim that the gap will be half a point, and there is nothing in the arithmetic that could make it one.

Value per game is the season's fantasy value divided by the games it was earned over, and the denominator is printed on the row for a reason. A rate built on eleven games and a rate built on sixty-two are different objects. The eleven-game player is either a breakout or a small sample, and nothing on this board can tell those apart — it will rank him above a steadier player with the same fixtures, confidently, because the arithmetic does not know the difference.

The other failure is a role that moved. A player promoted to the first power-play unit in January carries three months of fourth-line production in his denominator, so his rate understates him and the board ranks him too low. A player who lost that job carries the mirror-image error and is ranked too high. In both cases the season rate is correct about the season and wrong about next week, which is the week you are actually filling.

That makes the honest use of this page narrowing rather than deciding. Take the top of the board as a shortlist of players whose rate and fixtures both point the right way, then spend the judgement on the three things it cannot see: whether the rate is real, whether the role behind it still holds, and whether he is in the lineup. A player's last-ten split is where the second of those shows up first.

The reason to stream in a daily league is the empty slot: on a quiet night a fourth-liner you would never start on a Saturday walks into a slot that would otherwise score nothing. Set the lineup once a week and no such slot exists. Everyone you own plays every game his club plays, so the off-night column measures something that cannot reach you — and the composite is separating clubs on it regardless. Sort by games, or by value per game, and ignore the score.

The schedule still decides something for you, in its blunt form. A club with four games against a club with two is a straight doubling of opportunity across the whole scoring period, and no off-night arithmetic is needed to see it. That is the total column on the planner, and for a weekly league it is the more useful of the two pages.

The deeper difference is what a pickup has to be worth. In a daily league an add can earn its place in one night and be dropped the next morning. In a weekly league the same add holds a roster spot for the entire scoring period, so it has to beat the player you would otherwise have started all week — which usually means the answer is the better player rather than the busier schedule, and the ranked board is where you find him.

The cost of a stream is the drop, and this board has never seen your roster. It ranks who is worth starting; it cannot tell you whether the best name available is better than the last player on your bench. In a shallow league he usually is and the add is close to free. In a deep one the last man on your bench is frequently better than the best streamer in any given week, and the correct move is to do nothing — an answer no sorted board is capable of producing.

Nor does it know what your league charges for the transaction. Many leagues cap acquisitions per week, and many cap games played per position across a season; both turn an add into a limited resource rather than a free one. A board that ranks streams as though moves cost nothing will cheerfully spend one of a season's forty on a marginal edge.

Players with no club on record and players with no regular-season games to divide by are left off this board entirely rather than scored at zero, and both counts are printed beneath it. A zero here means a club that plays nothing in the window, which is a fact about the schedule. It must never also mean that something about the player is unknown.