Fantasy Hockey Glossary

Fantasy hockey borrows vocabulary from three places at once: real NHL statistics, general fantasy-sports theory, and the specific rules of your league. The result is a lot of shorthand. Knowing what each term means is the difference between reading a stat line at a glance and having to look it up every time.

Scoring statistics

• G, A, P — Goals, Assists, and Points. Points are simply goals plus assists, and in most points-based leagues a goal and an assist are each worth the same amount, though many leagues weight goals slightly higher.
• PPP — Power-Play Points. Points earned while the team is on the power play. Because power-play time is concentrated on a team's top unit, PPP is one of the most predictable and valuable categories.
• SOG — Shots on Goal. A volume category that rewards players who shoot often, even when the puck does not go in. Shooters like this tend to be safe, consistent contributors.
• PIM — Penalty Minutes. A category in more physical league formats. Chasing PIM often means rostering lower-scoring players, so weigh it carefully.
• PlusMinus — The team's goal differential while a player is on the ice at even strength. It is noisy and heavily team-dependent, which is why many managers treat it as a tiebreaker rather than a target.
• Blocks and Hits — Defensive volume categories. Both reward effort-based play and are useful for extracting value from defensemen and bottom-six forwards.

Goaltending statistics

• W — Wins. Goalie wins depend as much on the team in front of the goalie as on the goalie itself, so target starters on strong teams.
• GAA — Goals Against Average. The average number of goals a goalie allows per 60 minutes. Lower is better.
• SV% — Save Percentage. The share of shots a goalie stops. A goalie who posts a high save percentage on a weak team can still be a fantasy asset even without many wins.
• SO — Shutouts. Rare and high-variance, but valuable in categories that count them.

Roster and value terms

• VORP — Value Over Replacement Player. How much better a player is than the freely available option at the same position. VORP is why a middling center can be worth more than a slightly better winger: scarcity at the position raises the replacement bar.
• Replacement level — The production you could get for free off the waiver wire at a position. Your draft picks are only worth the gap between them and replacement level.
• Streaming — Rotating players in and out of your active roster to chase favorable schedules, usually to bank extra games from teams playing four times in a week.
• Punting — Deliberately ignoring one category to dominate the others. Common in category leagues where trying to win everything spreads you too thin.

Draft terms

• ADP — Average Draft Position. The average spot a player is taken across many drafts. ADP is your map of consensus value; the gaps between your own rankings and ADP are where you win or lose a draft.
• Tier — A group of players you consider roughly interchangeable. Drafting by tiers, rather than by a strict ranked list, keeps you from reaching for a name when an equivalent player will still be there a round later.
• Sleeper and Bust — A sleeper outperforms their ADP; a bust underperforms it. Both are judged relative to cost, not raw output.
• Keeper — A player you retain from one season to the next, usually at a cost such as a draft pick or a cap hit.

Trade and cap terms

• Buy low / Sell high — Trading for a good player during a cold streak, or trading one away during a hot streak, betting that performance returns to its true level.
• Cap hit — The salary a player counts against your team's cap in a cap-based league. A player's fantasy value is always relative to their cap hit.
• Two-for-one — A trade that consolidates two roster spots into one better player, freeing a roster slot for a waiver-wire add.

Keep this page handy during your draft and your first few weeks. Once the shorthand becomes second nature, the rest of the strategy guides in this section will read much faster.