How to use the Advanced Sandbox

A projection is a role plus a rate.

The rate is ours to measure: what a player produces per sixty minutes at even strength and on the power play, out of the game logs. The role is a forecast, which means it is an opinion, and it is the half you are entitled to disagree with. Almost nobody realises that disagreeing is on offer.

So start here. Every rate below is pinned at what the player actually did last season. The only thing you can move is his minutes.

The unit marks are measured, not rounded off: across the league a first power-play unit plays about 3.03 minutes a night and a second about 1.64, a gap of 1.39. That gap is what a promotion is actually worth, and on a player like Connor McDavid, who scores at 10.9 points per sixty on the power play, it is worth about 21 points across a season, if his scoring rate travelled with him. It would not entirely: a second unit is second for reasons that also depress the rate, which is one of the things the real Sandbox accounts for and this card deliberately does not.

A quick check that the arithmetic is honest. Leave the sliders where they load and the card reproduces each player's actual season to within a point or two, because his own minutes times his own rates is what he did. The small gap is short-handed scoring, which this card leaves out.

A whole line-up, and a fixed pool of minutes

The card above holds one player's rate still and moves his minutes, which teaches the arithmetic and hides the constraint. Here is the constraint. Nine forwards, three lines, and minutes that have to come from somewhere: press one player, press another, and they trade places. Promote a man and somebody is demoted in the same gesture, because that is what a line-up is.

Watch Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. He is the reason this card is Edmonton. He scores 1.53 points per sixty at even strength, which is ordinary for a first line, and 6.86 on the power play, which is not. Drop him to the third line and he loses about 6 points. Leave him on the first line and take him off the first power-play unit instead and he loses about 13, for a change that looks much smaller on a depth chart.

That is the whole reason the Sandbox is a line-up sheet rather than a list of numbers to type over. The power play is where the disagreements are worth having, and it is the row most people never look at.

The tile shows each man's projection and how far your version has moved it. Press the strip at the bottom of a tile to cycle his power-play unit; a unit will refuse a fifth forward rather than quietly overfilling. The slider adjusts the man the card is following.

What the Sandbox actually is

The Advanced Sandbox is a lineup sheet for all 32 clubs. Each one shows three bands, because a coach hands out three jobs and not one: even strength, the power play and the penalty kill. Drag a player between lines, between units, or off a unit entirely, and every number downstream of that decision moves.

Click a player and he opens underneath at full width, with the four things worth seeing before you argue with a projection: what he has done for four years, what he did in the minors, who he has played with, and how the last dozen nights went.

Step by step

1. Pick a club and read the sheet before you touch it. The lines are our forecast, and most of them are not controversial. Find the one or two you actually disagree with rather than rebuilding a roster that was already right.

2. Move the role, not the number. Promote a winger to the first unit, break up a line, hand a rookie a job. This is the edit that carries the most information, because you are changing the thing we forecast and leaving the thing we measured alone.

3. Then move the number, if you still disagree. Ice time, production per sixty or flat output are all editable. Use this second and sparingly: overriding a rate is saying you know his talent better than four years of his own play, which is sometimes true and usually not.

4. Watch what your edit costs somebody else. A club has a fixed pool of minutes. Promoting a man demotes another, and the sheet does that arithmetic rather than letting you hand out twenty-five minutes a night to six forwards. If your version of a lineup does not survive that constraint, it was not a lineup.

5. Save it as a set. A saved set is yours, named, and can be rebuilt or edited later.

Getting it into your draft

This is the part that gets missed, and it is the only reason the Sandbox is worth the effort.

Nothing is copied. The set is read at the moment the board or the workbook is built, so an edit you make tonight is in the file you download tomorrow.

Tips

Edit the players you are actually going to draft. A perfect fourth line changes nothing about your draft. The first unit of a club you are targeting changes plenty.

Disagree about roles more often than rates. Coaches surprise people; a player's own four-year scoring rate rarely does.

A rate you have to override to justify a pick is a warning. If a player only works at a rate he has never posted, the projection is not what is wrong.

Check the club total afterwards. If your edits leave a team scoring far more than any team scores, the sheet will still let you, and your draft board will believe you.

The tools

Rates are last season's points per sixty at each strength, from the game logs. Unit minutes are the measured averages of projected first and second units against last season's ice time. Season length is 84 games, derived from the schedule.