Fantasy Hub
One of the most common asks I’ve gotten for LB-Hockey throughout the years has been, “Do you have anything for fantasy hockey?” But since most of my interest was in descriptive analytics, player projections just weren’t at the top of the priority list… until now.
Please welcome the Fantasy Hub to LB-Hockey. That’s right, not just a single dashboard, but rather a complete fantasy hockey-focused environment to help you win your pools. It’s got it all, from custom league settings to automatically updated rankings as you draft, best players available by position at any given time, detailed projection cards, and even our projected standings all available in one place!
Where do I start?
We wanted the barrier to entry to be as low as possible so that you could get into it right away. All that’s required is that you enter your league settings in the first tab (titled “League Settings”). This includes roster size information such as the amount of teams in your league, the number of keepers they each have (just put a zero if it’s not a keeper league), and the count of players on each roster by position. This last part includes utility (flexible F-or-D) and bench slots. If you are in a league with simpler forward designations, such as C-W or just F, simply distribute them equally amongst these positions’ subgroups since the positional multiplier used later doesn’t vary a lot between them at equal counts. So for example if you have 6 unspecified-side winger slots in your league, just put down 3 LW and 3 RW.
Next is your league’s scoring system. Just enter the amount of points your league attributes to each of the above categories (with zeroes for those excluded). In cats leagues, aka ones where you want to beat your opponent in the most categories, enter a 1 for categories included in your league and a 0 for the others.
The last step is declaring keepers throughout the league. If your league isn’t a keeper league, then you’re already done! Otherwise, to aid with this step, the section will highlight the number of cells you need to fill out with a helpful counter column: “1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 2.1, 2.2, etc.” This section can also be used to just straight up remove players if you wish, like some leagues used to do with Gretzky in his playing days!
Who should I pick?
Now that you’ve entered your league’s settings, the Fantasy Hub is ready to roll. The following tab, titled “Fantasy Rankings”, has already updated and sorted the rankings for every player in the league with your settings taken into account! Declared keepers from the settings page will be highlighted in a light orange. And as your draft moves along, you can click the checkbox in the “Pick?” column to identify players that have been selected. The “Rank” column will auto-update to reflect the ranking of remaining available options.
The table displays player info (Yahoo Position, Age, Team), fantasy points in both totals and per-game form (along with their most recent season’s FPTS/GP), VORP, predicted skater stats, and predicted goalie stats.
But hold on, what is VORP? Well it’s the most important metric here and what we use to sort these rankings! VORP is a metric commonly used throughout fantasy sports as the abbreviation for Value Over Replacement Player. What’s distinct are the exact differences in calculation between sources. Here is our methodology:
- Predict player stat lines using the detailed LB-Hockey player impacts & styles data
- Weight each stat by your league’s scoring system and add them together (FPTS column)
- Multiply these totals by positional and team factors
- Position: accounts for the relative strength of each position with how many points a “replacement level player” is expected to get, aka how strong the waiver wire will likely be for players of this position (multi-position players obviously get a more favourable multiplier here)
- Team: accounts for the amount of “Off-Nights” the player’s team plays along with the ratio of bench slots in your lineup, to reward players who often play on days where few other teams do, aka hoping to maximize the amount of man games your roster can play and trigger the fewest sit/bench decisions
- Subtract the league’s replacement level score to get our final ranking
So that’s what the VORP column means! Even if you don’t fully understand certain steps of its calculation, all that matters for you are the resulting rankings with regard to player ordering and scale so you can draft smartly.
What if I want a different position player?
If you feel you already have enough left wingers on your roster or really feel the need to draft a defenceman with your next pick, the “Draft BPA” tab shall help. This page neatly displays the top 3 available players, separated by position. It shows their name, rank within the remaining options, projected fantasy points per game, and VORP.
How can I see all stats for a player in one compact view?
This is the dedicated viz within the Fantasy Hub. The “Projection Cards” tab grants you the ability to view our projected player stat lines for every player in the league. From the pointzzzz, to secondary offensive measures, and physical peripherals, all are displayed and even attached to their ranks league-wide.
There are two statistics I’d like to outline here which are both related to their environment. First are Team PTS, which are just the player’s team’s projected standings points (more on that in the next section). We also host a “Workload” estimation. This is calculated by looking at the depth chart within the team’s positional group, and ranking the player’s projected ice time (or starts for goalies) against his peers. So with the screenshot above, Sebastian Aho is projected to have the most TOI per game amongst Canes forwards this season.
One note about rookies: I unfortunately don’t have data within the LB-Hockey ecosystem for most of them, so their projected stat lines were manually estimated.
How does team strength factor into all this?
Having mentioned Team PTS in the previous section, and this variable feeding into our player-level model predictions (especially at the goalie level), it felt obvious to bring our standings projections into this hub. In the “Projected Standings” tab, you can view these broken down by components. First are positional groups: forwards (F), defencemen (D), and goalies (G). It should be noted that these measure the contributions (in SPAR form; you can read about the model here) of each group’s overall ability, meaning defensive play from forwards is in the “F” column while offensive play from defencemen remains in “D”.
Next is chemistry (Chem) which uses our projected chemistry model. While I don’t have a full article on its inner workings yet (hopefully in the coming future), here’s a high-level explanation of the approach from our multi-year cards glossary:
Linemates are found by looking at others who can mask weaknesses and support their strengths. Intuitively, a puck-carrying playmaker with little checking or defensive impact would thus end up paired with a responsible two-way power forward that can reliably finish their chances. Contrary to the “similar styles” section, players with somewhat close ice time and overall talent level are prioritized.
Injuries (Inj) are factored in as a combination of two mechanisms: injury losses and injury recapture. Losses are what you’d expect: standings points lost from already-known injuries going into the season, and likely injuries based on players’ health history risk. Meanwhile, injury recapture attempts to emulate how an injured slot affects a team’s roster, where they shift everyone else up and fill the now empty bottom slot with a call-up. So a deep team will be able to shuffle around and mitigate SPAR lost to injury better than one with a more imbalanced lineup.
After this first batch of components, a replacement-level-team baseline will be applied, which reflects how a team entirely built with replacement-level players would be expected to perform in this environment. This usually lands as an addition roughly in the low-40s to every team.
Lastly are two zero-sum (league sums to zero) components that are new to our method this year: strength of schedule (SoS) and rest. The latter identifies the amount of rest teams and their opponents carry for every game of the season. Being on the second half of a back-to-back will reduce your odds of winning, but playing against such a team will improve them. Both teams being tired will tend to flatten the odds, while a match between fully rested rivals is expected to result in outcomes that more appropriately reflect each team’s true talent.
Due to intra-conference and intra-division play, teams are forced to play certain opponents more often. This creates an imbalance in the average strength of one’s opponents over a full season. SoS captures that and shows its impact in standings point form. For example in the upcoming 2026-27 season, an entire 10 standings points shifted from the Eastern to the Western Conference since the West gets to play within itself against weaker teams more frequently. So a negative total here means a team is projected to face stronger teams than average, while a positive total indicates an easy schedule. For those curious, here are the 2026-27 totals split by division:
- Atlantic: -5.4
- Metro: -5.1
- Central: +3.5
- Pacific: +7.1
This corroborates the expectation that the Atlantic will be a very strong division, while the Pacific will be a notably weak one. Lastly, you can scroll to the right for more formats of these standings, including a full league view and simplified playoff picture.
Sign me up!
Hope you enjoy our Fantasy Hub! I’m really happy with how it has turned out, both in looks with its “The Matrix”-inspired visuals and predictive data, as I’m using it for my own fantasy hockey pools. You can get access to it (along with the rest of the LB-Hockey arsenal) by subscribing at the registration page. If anything, that investment should hopefully pay for itself by helping you win your pools!