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Custom rosters

Ratings

Twenty-two ratings for skaters and seven for goalies, each from 0 to 99. Here's what every one of them does.

Each player's ratings is a list of names and numbers:

"ratings": {
  "overall": 76,
  "speed": 72, "acceleration": 71, "agility": 66, "balance": 73, "strength": 71,
  "stamina": 69, "endurance": 71, "recovery": 71,
  "passing": 65, "shotAccuracy": 94, "shotPower": 85, "stickhandling": 80, "deking": 83, "tipping": 79,
  "checking": 57, "shotBlocking": 55, "stickDefense": 66, "faceoffs": 64, "discipline": 72,
  "durability": 71, "fighting": 54, "hockeySense": 70
}

The scale

50 is average: an everyday player in your league. Every rating works the same way, and each one is separate. A player can be a 95 shooter and a 30 skater.

Rating Means
25 Well below average: a real weakness.
50 Average. Any rating you leave out is 50.
65 Good.
75 Very good. A first-liner's strengths.
85+ Elite. Save these for the players who should feel special.
  • Whole numbers from 0 to 99. Anything below 0 counts as 0, anything above 99 as 99, and a decimal is rounded.
  • Ratings shade play, they don't script it. A 90 passer still misses sometimes, and a 30 passer still connects. Each rating moves its part of the game by a few percent to a few tens of percent either side of average.
  • Ratings aren't difficulty. They're how good your players are. How well the computer plays them is the difficulty setting (Rookie, Veteran, All-Star), whatever their ratings.

Skaters

Skating

Rating What it does
speed Top speed.
acceleration How quickly they get up to speed.
agility How tightly they turn and pivot, and how hard they can cut at speed without sliding.
balance Staying on their feet when they're hit.
strength How hard they hit and how well they stand up to hits. Also shoves, tie-ups on a faceoff, and holding on when someone lifts their stick.

Stamina

Every skater has a tank that hustling and hard hits drain. A tired skater is slower, and the bench boss changes lines when they get tired.

Rating What it does
stamina The size of the tank.
endurance How slowly hustling drains it, and how little being tired slows them down.
recovery How fast it fills again, on the ice and on the bench.

With the puck

Rating What it does
passing How accurate and how crisp their passes are, and how well a saucer pass lifts.
shotAccuracy How close their shots go to where they aim.
shotPower How hard they shoot.
stickhandling Puck control: carrying it, taking passes, how fast the blade moves, and keeping the puck when a stick comes in.
deking How hard a deke or a fake makes them to strip or hit, and for how long.
tipping Getting a blade on a teammate's shot in front of the net, and where the tip goes.

The best at deking, shotAccuracy and stickhandling (with a little shotPower and hockeySense) take the shootout attempts and penalty shots.

Without it

Rating What it does
checking How hard their body checks land.
shotBlocking How quickly and how wide they get down to block a shot, square to it.
stickDefense Reading the other team's passes and picking them off, and knocking the puck off a stick or out of the air.
faceoffs Winning draws. A forward who's much better on the draw than their center takes it instead.
discipline Keeping the stick clean. Low discipline means more trips and high sticks, so more penalties.

Everything else

Rating What it does
durability How well they take punishment: less chance a big hit injures them. (Injuries are rare events, which can be switched off.)
fighting With the gloves off: how hard they punch, how much they can take, and how ready they are to drop them.
hockeySense Reading the game. It nudges every other rating: up to 6 points higher at 99, 6 lower at 0.

Goalies

A goalie ("position": "G") uses seven ratings:

Rating What it does
reflexes How quickly they react to a shot.
positioning How closely they follow the puck across, keeping their angles, instead of a beat behind.
reboundControl How soft their rebounds are, and how well they steer them away from danger.
agility How quickly they move side to side.
hands How fast the glove and blocker move, and how well they catch and hold the puck.
durability As for skaters.
hockeySense As for skaters: a nudge to the others.

The game reads only these seven for a goalie and ignores any others, including puckHandling and stamina, which some roster tools include. A goalie passes, shoots and takes a hit like an average player.

Overall

overall doesn't change how anyone plays. The game only uses it to pick who fills a hole in a lineup (the best spare by overall goes in). Set it to your own summary of the player, and the checker shows it in each team's lineup.

Making players feel different

A league where everyone's 60 at everything plays like a league of clones. Give each player a few strengths and a weakness or two. Some starting points:

Player Raise Lower
Sniper shotAccuracy, shotPower, stickhandling checking, shotBlocking
Playmaker passing, stickhandling, hockeySense fighting, checking
Speedster speed, acceleration, agility strength, balance
Power forward strength, balance, checking, shotPower agility
Net-front tipping, strength, balance speed
Faceoff specialist faceoffs, stickDefense, discipline
Grinder checking, stamina, endurance, shotBlocking stickhandling, deking
Enforcer fighting, checking, strength discipline, stickhandling, deking
Offensive D passing, shotPower, stickhandling shotBlocking
Shutdown D stickDefense, shotBlocking, checking, strength deking
Brick-wall goalie reflexes, positioning, reboundControl

The example repository rates all 40 of its players this way, so it's a good place to copy from.

Balancing a league

  • Keep the middle near 50. The game is balanced around it, and if most players are above 70, nobody stands out.
  • Make the stars rare. A handful of 85s in a league feel special. Forty of them don't.