Standings count points. Puckigree asks how you got them.
A win is not just a win. Beating the league’s best says more than beating its worst, and losing to a contender isn’t the same as losing to a cellar-dweller. Puckigree is a pedigree for every team’s record.
Every game gets a grade
We score each result and how convincing it was. Regulation wins count more than overtime or shootout wins. Margin matters a little, but blowouts are capped.
The opponent changes the grade
Beat a strong team and you earn more. Lose to a strong team and it barely hurts. Lose to a weak team and it costs you the most.
Strength is earned, all the way down
An opponent’s strength is its own Puckigree, not its spot in the standings. A team padding its record against weak teams gets marked down, and so does the credit for beating it.
Recent form counts more
Teams change over a season. The latest stretch of games carries more weight than October does in March.
See it settle
Interactive · runs in your browserPass 1 only knows wins and losses. Each later pass swaps in every opponent’s newest strength, so wins over teams that turned out good count for more. Teams re-sort as their schedules come into focus, then everything stops moving. Toy league, made-up results.
Reading the numbers
- Rating
- 0 is a league-average team. Higher is better. The gap between two ratings drives the matchup odds.
- Range
- How sure we are. Early in the season a rating could plausibly sit anywhere in a wide band; it narrows as games pile up.
- Gap
- Standings rank minus Puckigree rank. Positive means a team is better than its record; negative means its record is flattering.
- Schedule
- How strong a team’s opponents have been, ranked 1 (hardest) to 32 (easiest).
- On the line
- For each game we re-run the rankings with every possible result, so you can see exactly what a win or loss would do.
Rankings update every night, after the last game ends. Until every team has played about 10 games they’re an early read, leaning on where teams finished last season; the timeline shows every night either way.
Ratings are results-based and adjusted for opponents: who won, by how much, and against whom, starting each season from where teams finished the last. Shot quality is shown beside them but doesn’t move them, because it didn’t make the predictions better in our backtest. Nightly odds add home ice, road back-to-backs and the likely starting goalies. The NHL doesn’t confirm starters ahead of time, so the odds blend each team’s two most-used goalies by how likely each is to start. Injuries and trades aren’t in them yet. And the odds aren’t betting advice.