Draft Center Primer

[cjrasmussen]

Drafts in FantasyHockeySim leagues take place in a manner that we've historically called pseudo-live.  Each team's selection is made in realtime but the player picked is taken from the top of a list that can be updated by the team's general manager right up until the point that the selection happens.  As such, GMs can choose to build out a list in advance and skip the draft entirely, to only add players to their list when it is their turn to pick, or something in between.

Our official recommendation is to build out a list in advance, just in case something goes wrong in the middle of the draft.  No one wants to be the person who lost their internet connection just as they were adding their selection to the site.  To that end, here are other thoughts on the best way to build a draft list:

In most cases, to cover every possibility, your draft list only needs to be long enough to reach your last selection in the draft.  This means that if your only pick is at fourth overall, you only need four names on your list.  If you close out your draft at 48th overall, your list should have 48 names.  Anything less and you would be taking a chance on running out of options before your final draft pick comes up.

To be clear, it is perfectly acceptable to take that chance, just understand that you're doing so.

There are two exceptions to the above "rule."

First is in the case of an Entry Draft with an age limit in place.  If you pick 48th overall and your list has 48 names, with five underage players on that list, it would be possible for the other 43 players on your list to have been selected by other teams by the time your pick at 48th overall came up.  With only underage players remaining, there would be no one eligible on your list and your pick would go unused.  As such, your Entry Draft list should include 48 eligible players.

The second is in the case of an Expansion Draft with limits on how many players each team can lose.  If your last pick is 20th overall, you would normally need a 20-person draft list.  However, in this scenario it would be possible for your 20th-rated player to come from a team that has already lost its allotment of players.  As such, that player would be removed from your list and no longer there to be selected at 20th overall.  The remedy for this is to build a longer list but, depending on the specifics of your Expansion Draft, that could be hard to do.  As such, we recommend building as long of a list as you feel comfortable building, then clicking the "Quick List" button to add the rest of the available players to your list.  You should then take care to remove any players who you have a deal not to select, if applicable.  This will give you the longest list possible while still prioritizing your selections as much as possible.

[cjrasmussen]

"Draft Priority Groups" have rolled out for the Entry Draft.  Details about how they work can be found in the related release announcement.

[cjrasmussen]

It is worth noting that player names are not unique.  Just ask Sebastian Aho.  No, the other one.

As such, when you enter a player's name in the Draft Center for an Entry Draft, you'll be given a list of possible matches for that name.  Make sure that the player you select from that list is the one you intend to add to your list.

Otherwise you might end up with the Australian Sam Bennett.

[cjrasmussen]

It is possible to add a player to your draft list for whom the FHS system does not have certain pieces of data. When that happens, the player will be added to your list and a process will be queued to fill in the missing data.

This is worth noting because it is technically possible to have an eligible player on your draft list who does not get selected even though they should have been, if the player was added close enough to your team's selection. For example...

It is May 29, 2026, and you are in a league where players must be at least 18 years old to be eligible for the Entry Draft. With one minute before your team's selection is to be made, you add a player to your draft list who was born on April 27, 2008. This player is 18 years old and, therefore, eligible. However, the FHS system is only able to immediately determine that the player was born in 2008. In that case, it will be assumed that he was born on December 31, 2008, in which case the draft system would consider him 17 years old until the data backfill process can run and put the correct birthdate in the system. That process can take several minutes to run, meaning that your team's selection would come up before the correct data was in place and the player would be considered ineligible.

This is likely an edge case but is worth understanding.