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. Goalies still carry the other six attributes too — this doesn't replace them — but shooting is essentially irrelevant for a goalie and stays low.
• Faceoff — mostly meaningful for centers, who roll a real value; every other position defaults to a flat middling number.

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. See Scouting Prospects for what stays hidden and what doesn't.

Archetypes

Every skater and goalie is also tagged with an archetype — a label that shapes both how their attributes were rolled 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 — a style tag with no line-chemistry role of its own, since goalies aren't part of a line or pairing.

A player's archetype tag isn't permanently fixed at recruiting — it's re-derived from whatever their attributes turn out to be once they're on your roster. It's not a bug if a recruit you signed as a "Sniper" reads as something else a season or two later; the label is catching up to how the player developed. See Player Development for how archetype shapes growth itself.

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.

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

See Also

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