How A-Squad works

Spin. Two reels turn: one lands on a franchise, the other on a decade. Together they name a roster, and it holds everyone who dressed for that team in that decade with at least 10 games played, or 5 starts for a goalie. There are 185 of these regular team-and-decade buckets, and the typical one holds about a hundred players.

Pick. Tap a player, then choose the slot to play them in. Your squad has six: a centre, a left wing, a right wing, two defencemen and a goalie. Any forward can fill any forward slot, and the sheet prints each player’s natural positions so you know when a centre is playing the wing. Defencemen play defence and goalies play goal, full stop.

Repeat. Six rounds, six spins, six picks. Then puck drop: the record counts up on the jumbotron, the grade drops in, and the breakdown shows what each pick was worth.

Every run comes with one team re-spin and one era re-spin. They are always free and never behind an ad. A mild anti-repeat also keeps the reel from handing you the franchise you just drew, as long as enough other buckets still fit your open slots.

In Play and Practice you can spend earned coins on extra re-rolls beyond the free two. The moment you do, the run becomes “boosted”, which is covered under Coins below. Daily and challenge runs never sell re-rolls, because everyone on those spins has to face the same problem.

Each card prints an era-adjusted stat line paced to 84 games: the season this player would have had with that team on today’s scoring and today’s schedule. That is what lets a 1950s winger and a 2010s winger sit on the same sheet.

The drafting guide covers how to read a sheet quickly and when to take the goalie.

The record comes from a statistical model built only from public box-score statistics: the numbers printed in every game summary since 1917. Records are projected from era-adjusted box-score statistics only. There is no scouting opinion in it, no hand-tuned legend bonus, and no tracking data that exists only for recent seasons.

Players are compared across eras by adjusting for how the league scored in their season. A goal in a year when teams averaged four a game is not worth the same as a goal in a year when they averaged two and a half. This is the single most important idea in the game.

Your six are the core of a team whose remaining roster is treated as league average. The model turns those six into projected goals for and goals against per game, both of which are printed on your result, and from there into an 84-game win-loss-overtime record and a grade. Beside each pick, +X W tells you how much that player moved the record, which is how the breakdown finds your weakest link.

We checked the model against more than 1,750 real NHL team seasons before shipping it, and a perfect season is possible but rare. The exact weights are not published. A-Squad is a draft, not a calculator; if we printed them, every spin would become a lookup and the argument would end. We also tune the model between seasons. For what the numbers on your result mean, read reading your season result.

The NHL plays an 84-game schedule from 2026-27, so that is the season every squad is projected onto. Every era sits on the same scale, so a 1930s squad and a 2020s squad can be compared directly. Records are written as wins, losses and overtime losses, even for players who retired long before an OTL column existed, because that is how a season reads today. A perfect season is 84-0-0. The perfect-season guide explains why so few squads get there.

Seven grades, from the top down. Each is a felt pennant on your result and on your GM Card.

Two percentages, two different yardsticks, labelled differently on purpose. Beats X% of squads, on the jumbotron after a run, compares your record with a large population of simulated competent squads. It is fixed: it means the same thing on your first day as a year from now.

The Field, on your GM Card, compares your recent average with real players, and it moves as they keep drafting. It appears once you have three Play runs on your card, so a single lucky spin cannot put you at the top of it.

Draft % is your wins divided by the best record our solver found for those exact spins. It is the luck-neutral half of a result: it separates how well you drafted from how well the spins treated you. The solver is a heuristic, not an oracle, so a sharp draft can beat it; when that happens the best-found figure moves up to yours and Draft % reads 100%. It is hidden on boosted runs, because purchased re-rolls change the problem the solver was asked to solve.

Streaks and boards are covered in the daily and challenge guide. Today’s spins are waiting on the Daily page.

A game with shared spins and public boards has to say how it prevents cheating. Here is all of it.

Coins are earned by playing and nowhere else. There is nothing to buy, and coins have no cash value. The full table:

Coins buy extra team or era re-rolls in Play and Practice, priced 25, 50, 100 and 200 within one run, four at most. A run that spends a coin is marked boosted: it earns no coins, shows no Draft %, and stays off your GM Card and every board, because those compare people with people. Guests hold up to 100 coins until they sign in, when the balance moves to the account and the cap comes off.

Your GM Card is one page that says what kind of general manager you are: last-10 form and its trend, your place in The Field, a tally of every grade, the average wins your picks add at each position, the eras you lean on and the players you draft most, a record book of your best seasons, and a banner cabinet with a pennant for each grade you have hung. Tap any run to reopen its result.

Guests have a GM Card too, kept on this device. Sign in and it comes with you, along with your streak and your coins. New here? Start with a run.