Reading Your A-Squad Season Result, Line by Line

The big number is your record, written the way the NHL writes it: wins, losses, overtime losses. Under it sits a pill with your points total, two for a win and one for an overtime loss, over 84 games. Eighty-four is the length of the current NHL schedule, so every squad plays the same season.

You will see the OTL column even when your squad is six players from the 1950s, when a tied game simply ended tied. That is deliberate. A-Squad plays one all-era format: an Original Six squad and a 2010s squad are graded on the same schedule with the same rules, and era differences are handled inside the model rather than by giving each squad its own scoring system.

The model compares your six across eras by adjusting for how the league scored in their season, treats the rest of the roster as league-average, and turns the whole thing into projected goals for and against per game. That gap becomes a projected 84-game record and a grade. It is a forecast, not a replay.

Above the record hangs a pennant with a grade on it. There are seven, from the top: PERFECT, HISTORIC, DYNASTY, CONTENDER, PLAYOFF, BUBBLE, LOTTERY. Each is a band of projected win totals, described here in hockey terms rather than as published cutoffs.

Most well-drafted squads land on CONTENDER or PLAYOFF, and that is a good result. A random six of eligible players averages around 30 wins in our simulations, deep in LOTTERY territory; competent drafting lands in the high 50s, and the ceiling is in the 80s.

Below the pennant a pill reads something like GF 3.40 · GA 2.35 / game. These are the two projected rates the record is built from: how many goals a team around your six would score in a typical game, and how many it would allow. A squad wins on the gap between them, not on either number alone.

This is the most useful diagnostic on the sheet. If the record disappointed you, look here first, because it says whether the problem was scoring or keeping the puck out. Both numbers are in a modern scoring environment whatever era your players came from, which is what makes an all-era comparison honest.

The roster card lists your six by slot: C, LW, RW, D, D, G. Beside each name is a number like +6.2 W, which is how many wins that pick moved the record, measured against a league-average player standing in the same slot. A big positive number is a pick that carried you.

It can be negative. A player rated below the league-average stand-in, or a forward playing a position he did not play, can cost you wins, and the number goes red. Under the six rows we call out the WEAKEST LINK: the slot with the lowest wins added, name attached. That is the pick to think hardest about.

One caution: the six numbers do not add up to the record, and they are not meant to. A great goalie behind a bad defence is worth a different amount than the same goalie behind a great one, so wins are not a bucket you fill one player at a time. Read the per-slot figures as a ranking of your picks, not a ledger.

Two small marks can appear under a name on the result sheet. The first is “out of position”. During the draft a forward can fill any forward slot, while defencemen fill only D and goalies only G. When a forward plays a spot he did not play in real life, the model charges a cost for it, and the sheet flags it so you can see the trade you made.

The second is “cameo”. A skater gets a card for a team-era once he has played ten games with that club in that era, but under 40 games he is marked a cameo; for goalies the line is under 20 starts. A cameo card is built on a small sample, so the model treats it cautiously, and the badge says the card may be less than the name suggests.

On a classic or practice result, the pennant carries a line like BEATS 71% OF SQUADS. That percentage compares your win total to a large field of simulated squads, each drafted competently from its own random spins: against people who played the game well on their own reels, where does this record sit?

It is a comparison with simulations, not with the people on the leaderboard, and we say so wherever it appears. Your GM Card carries a separate percentile, THE FIELD, that ranks you against real players once you have a few runs behind you. On a challenge result the line steps aside because a real opponent replaces it: the record you were sent to beat is right there on the board.

The last pill reads something like DRAFT 91% · BEST FOUND 63. When a run is scored, a solver plays your exact spins many ways and reports the best record it found. Your Draft % is your wins divided by that total. It is the luck-neutral half of a result: two friends on the same challenge seed drew the same buckets, so this separates how well you played the seed from how well the seed treated you.

The solver is a heuristic, not an oracle. It finds a strong plan quickly rather than proving the best one exists, so you can legitimately beat it; when you do, the pill reads 100% and BEST FOUND becomes your own total. The pill is absent on boosted runs, where coins bought extra re-spins in Play or Practice, because the solver plans against the standard re-spin budget and a boosted run is not answering the same question.

The sheet is most useful in the moment before you tap New game. Three cheap habits:

Then spin again. The reels will not deal you the same six, but the reading carries over.