Attributes, Archetypes & Ratings

Every player boils down to a handful of numbers you'll use constantly. Here's what they mean.

The Seven Core Attributes

Every skater and goalie carries the same seven attributes, each rated 1–99:

• Skating — speed, how well they hold up over a shift, and their ability to draw penalties.
• Shooting — how often a scoring chance becomes a goal.
• Passing — how often they set up a teammate for one.
• Physical — hitting, checking, and generating momentum for their line.
• Defending — the main attribute behind stopping the other team's scoring chances.
• Goaltending — a goalie's headline rating, and the number that actually determines how many pucks he stops. His Style archetype (see "Goalie Style" below) layers real situational strengths and weaknesses on top of it. A goalie's other five attributes ride along on his card but don't move his own performance in net. The gap between a genuinely elite netminder and an average one is real and meaningful — don't expect a middling backup to steal you many games just because he's between the pipes.
• Faceoff — how often a player wins a draw at the dot. Centers take faceoffs, so Faceoff is a real, varying rating for centers specifically; every other position carries a flat league-average value since they're never the one taking the draw.

Goalies carry one more rating on top of these seven: Composure — see "Goalie Style" below for what it does.

These aren't flavor text — they show up directly in the box score. Across a long run of simulated seasons, the league's goal leaders carry a Shooting rating far above the league average, assist leaders carry an outsized Passing rating, and the leaders in hits and penalty minutes both carry an outsized Physical rating. If you're building a true finisher, weight Shooting; if you want a set-up man, weight Passing; if you want a physical, momentum-generating power forward, weight Physical.

Power Play & Penalty Kill Ratings

Beyond the seven core attributes, every skater's profile also shows a PP Rating and a PK Rating — two further ratings blended from the core attributes above rather than trained directly:

• PP Rating blends Shooting, Passing, and Skating — the finishing and playmaking tools that actually produce goals on the man advantage.
• PK Rating blends Defending, Skating, and Physical — the tools that actually kill penalties.

They move automatically as the attributes behind them change, and they're what the game weighs when you (or Auto-Configure Lineup) build your PP1/PP2 and PK1/PK2 units — a shutdown defenseman can carry a lower PP Rating than his Overall suggests, and a higher PK Rating than it suggests, and that's exactly why he's a penalty-kill fixture rather than a power-play weapon. See Lineups & Special Teams for how individual PP/PK Ratings roll up into a full unit's rating.

Overall & Potential

Overall (OVR) blends all of that into one number, 1–99, and is what most of the app sorts and compares by. Potential (POT) is the separate ceiling that number can grow toward — always at least as high as a player's current overall, and hidden until you've scouted them thoroughly enough to see it.

A prospect's star rating is always computed from their true, unfogged overall, so a 5-star talent is never secretly hiding as a lower tier, even before you've scouted them:

None of these tiers has a ceiling of its own — a "5-star" recruit at 80 overall and one at 95 overall are both just 5-star, so within the top tier the star badge alone doesn't tell you how special a prospect really is; that's exactly what scouting is for.

A truly special ceiling is genuinely rare, and it should be — a prospect who's realistically going to develop into a 90+ overall difference-maker is the kind of get that defines a signing class, not something you should expect out of a typical recruiting haul. If your scouting turns one up, that's a real event, not a routine outcome.

The gap between a good player and a great one is bigger than the 1–99 scale might suggest at a glance. A 90-plus overall skater produces roughly five times the points per game of a solid 65–69 overall regular over a full season — the production curve accelerates hard at the top of the scale, rather than climbing in a straight line. That's exactly why one elite recruit, or one existing player's development jump into the 80s, can move a program's ceiling more than several depth signings combined.

Archetypes

Every skater and goalie is also tagged with an archetype — a label that shapes both how their attributes were set and how they'll grow from here:

• Forwards: Sniper (built to finish), Playmaker (built to set up teammates), Power Forward (physical), Two-Way Forward (defensively sound), Grinder (physical and defensively sound).
• Defensemen: Offensive Defenseman, Defensive Defenseman, Two-Way Defenseman.
• Goalies: Butterfly, Hybrid, Acrobatic — no line-chemistry role, since goalies aren't part of a line or pairing, but each style carries a real, situational edge of its own. See "Goalie Style" below.

A player's archetype tag isn't locked in forever. The moment a prospect signs, their tag is reconciled against their actual attributes — so it's not a bug if a "Sniper" you scouted signs and reads as something else on your roster; the label just caught up to their real numbers. From there, years of training — especially a deliberate training focus that pulls against a player's current label — can genuinely earn him a new archetype altogether. See Player Development's "When a Player's Archetype Changes" for exactly how that works and where you'll see it happen.

Line Chemistry

The archetypes on a line or defense pair change how well that unit performs, independent of raw talent:

• Forward lines: one Sniper, one Playmaker, and one Two-Way Forward or Power Forward together is the ideal mix — a finisher, a distributor, and a physical/defensive presence. All three sharing the same archetype is a real penalty; anything else is neutral.
• Defense pairs: one Offensive Defenseman paired with one Defensive Defenseman is the ideal combination — a puck-mover and a stay-at-home partner. Two of the same archetype is a real penalty.

The swing between the two extremes is real — roughly a 30-percentage-point gap between an optimally-built unit and a clashing one (a ±15% modifier applied to the unit's on-ice output either way) — worth genuinely planning your lines and pairs around.

This is exactly what Auto-Configure Lineup is solving for on top of raw talent — see Lineups & Special Teams.

Goalie Style

A goalie's archetype describes a real tradeoff between styles of play — here's what each one means:

• Butterfly — technical and positional. The most reliable of the three on a penalty kill and the best at holding up late in a tiring game, but a touch more human in a shootout's isolated one-on-one moment.
• Acrobatic — reflexive and athletic. His instincts shine in a shootout, but he tires faster than most and is the least reliable of the three holding structure through a long penalty kill.
• Hybrid — a balanced, well-rounded style with no particular edge or weakness in any one situation.

None of the three is strictly better — each trades away something to be great at something else, so who you want in net can genuinely depend on the moment: a Butterfly starter for a heavy penalty-kill night, an Acrobatic goalie you trust if the game's likely to go to a shootout.

If you eyeball the league's save-percentage leaders, Butterfly goalies often dominate the list — but that reflects who tends to land in each archetype more than any hidden edge in the style itself: a real majority of the best goaltending prospects in a given class happen to grade out Butterfly. Compare two goalies with the same raw Goaltending rating side by side and the archetype gap shrinks down to the small, situational edges described above.

Composure decides how strongly that style actually shows up for a given goalie. Two Acrobatic goalies aren't identical in the moment — a composed one leans further into the shootout edge and holds up better under fatigue and on the penalty kill than his archetype alone would suggest; a rattled one barely shows his style's edge at all, in either direction. It works the same way for a Butterfly or Hybrid goalie — composure never changes which style you're getting, only how much of it you feel. It's generated independently of raw Goaltending, so a goalie can be a great shot-stopper who folds in big moments, or a modest one who's rock-solid when it matters. Train it directly with the Big-Moment Composure focus on the Training tab, or leave it to develop slowly on its own — every goalie picks up a small amount of it passively each offseason regardless of what you're training. Watch it pay off on the player profile's stat table: PK SV% and Shootout SV% columns sit alongside the usual season line, splitting out exactly the situations composure and archetype both touch.

See Also

• Player Development — how overall and attributes grow over time
• Scouting Prospects — what's hidden about a prospect and how to reveal it
• Lineups & Special Teams — building lines around chemistry, not just talent