How to evaluate your league’s scoring settings
Unless this is the first fantasy hockey article you’ve ever read, you’ve probably heard the refrain, “Make sure you know your scoring setup inside and out!” But just knowing the setup is just one piece of the puzzle. It’s one thing to realize your league gets six points for a goal and just three for an assist, but how does that affect your draft? How do we rank players in leagues versus points leagues? These are the questions we need answers to to crush our designs (and our competition). Let’s get in:
categories against points
The most common distinction between your leagues is categories versus points. Whether your league is a rotisserie-style league or the more common head-to-head format, it fits one of these two scoring methods. Categories pit managers against each other in an attempt to outperform the others in each individual category, while points allocate a specific number of points to each stat (i.e. six points for a goal and three points for an assist, as mentioned above) and managers simply try to to score the most points. Both formats have different strategic elements that boil down to two main points: weight for point leagues and scarcity for category leagues.
point weighting
Point weighting is exactly what it sounds like: how many points do you get for each stat? By definition, each different scoring system emphasizes certain stats and downplays others. My favorite way to quickly analyze which stats are being heavily emphasized in a given setup is to compare them to the baseline score weighting for goals. Assists are usually about 2/3 the weight of a goal (if a goal is three points, an assist would be two). Each higher weight emphasizes assists and makes players who receive a lot of assists more valuable, while lower weights place less emphasis on assists and those player types. For almost every other stat, I would consider anything more than 1/10th of a target’s weight as a highlight, and anything else would be a de-rating of that stat. This applies to Plus/Minus, Powerplay Points, Shots on Goal, Hits, Blocks and PIM as the most commonly used stats.
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You can use this simple comparison as a rough idea, but to take things to the next level, you can find someone you trust’s predictions and enter your league’s point weight to get player ranks. I mentioned several sources for projections in my How to Make Sense of Player Projections article a week ago so you can start there. Once you’ve entered your league’s point weight into the projection sheet, you should be able to sort by total fantasy points and build your ranking that way. Having predictions that you can trust is a great way to gain an edge over your competition as you can identify players who expect to score very high but are in your league’s ADP or rankings stand far below.
scarcity category
When you’re in a category league, it can be easy to take a simplistic approach and think that you should weight each category exactly equally. After all, there is one win per category, right? Unfortunately, this approach fails to recognize that some statistics are easier to obtain than others. For example, there are plenty of hits on the waiver wire throughout the season, but finding a top scorer mid-season is much harder. Because of this, you should prioritize goalscorers over hitters (and value those who do both even more).
It’s also important to consider how many categories your league has related to scoring and how many related to peripherals. If your league’s skater categories are goals, assists, points, power play points, game-winning goals, and scoring, you should obviously focus on players who are scoring far more goals and points than players who have been in five Years have taken many of the categories relate to the assessment, while only one is based on a peripheral category. If the same league added shots on goal, blocks and PIMs, it would obviously shift the balance much further towards players filling those categories.
Category leagues without many peripheral categories like blocks and PIMs devalue deep defenders who may only make meaningful contributions in those categories. Category leagues with many point-related categories and not many peripheral categories should urge you to prioritize the top-end defender-scorers as there is a large drop-off from the elite point-scorers at that position. Because most NHL teams only have one defender in each powerplay session, there are about 32 top powerplay defenders in the league and fewer still who consistently produce points. In a category league with a heavy emphasis on point production, consider a strategy that focuses on getting three or four of these PP1 defenders to avoid relegation later in your draft.
Finally, you should consider how your categories affect your strategy at the goalie position. First, check the ratio of your league’s skater categories to goalie categories. Of course, a league with nine skater categories and only three goalie categories will rate goaltenders very differently than a league with only five skater categories and four goalie categories. You should also consider whether your league’s categories are rate-based (GAA, SV%) or volume-based (W, SV, SHO); If you have a lot of volume-based categories, you might be able to focus on finding goalies that might not be playing well but are playing a lot of games, whereas with more rate-based categories you need to find goalies that are actually playing well.
Nate Groot Nibbelink is the creator of Apples & Gino’s Fantasy Hockey and the originator of the #ZeroG blueprint strategy. You can find him discussing obscure fantasy hockey strategy topics in the Apple’s & Gino’s Discord Server or on Twitter @applesginos.
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