Draft Queue and Autopick

The draft queue is a small but important safety net. Drafts run on a clock, and life happens — kids interrupt, work calls, the wifi cuts out. Without a queue, the autopick falls back to a generic "best player available" ranking that may not match the team shape you're building. With a queue, you decide in advance which players autopick should grab on your behalf.

How the queue works

• It's personal and per-draft. Your queue is your own list — every team manages their own, and you can't see anyone else's. Each draft has its own queue tied to the DraftQueue model in the database.
• You order it. Players are listed top-to-bottom in your preference order. Drag a player up to prioritize them; drag them down to deprioritize. The top entry is the one autopick will reach for first.
• It updates live. Reorder while the draft is running — your changes save the instant you drop a player into a new position. You don't have to commit anything.
• It persists across reconnections. Close your browser tab, reopen it, log back in — your queue is exactly where you left it. The draft engine reads from the database, not from your session.

What autopick actually does

When your pick clock hits zero before you confirm a selection:

1. The draft engine reads your queue, top to bottom.
2. It picks the highest-ranked player who is still available. Players already drafted (by any team, even since you last reordered) are skipped automatically — you don't have to clean up after picks.
3. The pick is recorded as a normal pick, the same as if you'd clicked Confirm yourself. It counts against your roster and (if applicable) against your salary cap and position limits.
4. If your queue is empty OR every player in your queue has already been drafted, the engine falls back to the league's "best player available" ranking and picks the top of that.

Position limits: telling autopick when to stop taking forwards

Queue order alone has a blind spot. If you rank by talent, your queue is usually forwards at the top — so autopick takes forwards until they run out, and the defensemen and goalies you were counting on get drafted by someone else while you were spending picks up front.

Position limits fix that. Open Position limits under the auto-draft checkbox in the queue panel and set how many of your picks each position may consume:

• Blank means no limit. Nothing changes until you set a number, so leaving this alone keeps the old behaviour exactly.
• A number caps that position. Once you've used it up, autopick skips past those players and takes the next one down your queue that still fits.
• 0 means avoid that position — but see the fallback rule below.

Positions are never ranked against each other. The limit is a filter and your queue order is the priority: autopick walks your list top to bottom and takes the first player whose position isn't spent. You've already said what you want by ordering the queue.

The limits count picks in this draft, not your roster

This is what makes the same setting work in a full draft and in a four-pick keeper draft. A 32-player keeper roster would blow past every limit before the draft even started, so the roster is never counted — only the picks you make in this draft, whether autopick made them or you made them yourself.

Worked example: a four-pick keeper draft

You have four picks, and a queue of 20 forwards, 5 defensemen and 3 goalies ranked by talent. You need two forwards, a defenseman and a goalie.

Set Forwards 2, Defense 1, Goalies 1. Autopick then takes your top two forwards, skips the rest of the forwards, takes your top defenseman, and finishes with your top goalie.

That works because the numbers add up to exactly the picks you have. When your limits sum to your pick count, they stop being maximums and become an exact composition. The panel does this arithmetic for you — it tells you how many of your picks are allocated, and lists the players you'd actually end up with if the draft ran right now. If that list is missing a goalie, lower another position by one.

Limits always bend before a pick is lost

If nothing left in your queue fits your limits, autopick takes your highest-ranked available player anyway rather than waste the pick. An unbalanced roster beats an empty slot, so this is deliberate and there's no way to turn it off — a limit of 0 can be overridden too, if that position is genuinely all that's left.

When this happens the queue panel tells you which player went over and why, so an over-budget pick doesn't look like your settings were ignored.

Same position in a row

Below the limits there's an optional rule: don't take more than N of the same position in a row. It spaces your picks out across a long draft. In a short draft your position limits already do the work, so you can leave it blank.

If autopick has to choose between breaking this rule and breaking a position limit, the streak rule gives way first — spacing is a preference, the position limits are the actual instruction.

Loading your queue before the draft

Open the draft room before the start time and use the queue tab to pre-load your top targets. You can also reorder from the available-player list during the draft — every player row has a "queue" action that adds them to the end of your queue or moves them to a specific position.

A solid pre-draft queue covers more than just your first pick. If you're picking 8th in a 12-team snake draft, queue your top 25 to 30 players. The first eight are usually gone by the time it gets to you, so the depth helps autopick make a sensible choice if you're disconnected for the entire opening round.

Queue + auction drafts

Auction drafts use the queue slightly differently. Instead of "who gets picked when you go AFK," the queue in an auction draft holds:

• Nominees, with target opening bids — when it's your turn to nominate, the system can grab the top of the queue.
• Watch targets, with maximum-bid amounts — the auto-bidder will bid up to your set max on these players during their nomination window.

The auto-bidder is opt-in per player; it doesn't bid blindly across your whole queue. See Auction Draft Walkthrough for the bidding flow.