Game Day

Lineups & Special Teams

Building your lineup is more than stacking your highest-rated players on the top line. Fit, staff quality, and fatigue all change what actually happens once the puck drops.

Auto-Configure Lineup

This isn't a blind talent sort — it looks for the combination of lines and pairs that produces the most on-ice value, factoring in chemistry alongside raw talent. A strong player can slide to a different slot than his "natural" position if it makes the line better as a whole, though the tool won't drift a star wildly out of position chasing a marginal gain — a franchise player never ends up buried on a bottom line.

Your Assistant Coach's quality changes the result, not just the advice. A weak assistant makes visible, bounded mistakes: a good player slotted one line lower than he should be, or a softer pairing on a secondary special-teams unit. A strong or elite assistant delivers a clean, optimal lineup. The outcome is consistent for a given roster, too — running Auto-Configure again reproduces the same result, so there's no benefit to repeatedly tapping it hoping for a better roll. See Support Staff.

Optimize Ice Time

This distributes each unit's minutes toward your strongest lines and pairs while protecting tired legs — every line and pair has both a floor and a ceiling on minutes, so your top unit gets fed heavier without any unit going unused or overworked. As with lineup construction, a weaker coaching staff blends this toward a flatter, less optimal split that leaves too many minutes on your bottom lines.

Both tools — along with your in-game tactics and training — can be handed to your staff to run automatically every week via Delegate to Staff, still gated by the same staff quality as running them yourself. See Support Staff.

Stamina & Fatigue — Two Different Meters

Stamina is short-term and mostly resets week to week — it drains during games and recovers between them, faster with better facilities. A team playing on low stamina takes a measurable hit to its on-ice output.
Season fatigue is the cumulative toll of a whole year's workload — it builds from heavy minutes, only resets in the offseason, and caps how high your short-term stamina can even recover to once it climbs. Left unmanaged, it also chips away at happiness. Resting a worn-down player during a bye week is a genuine remedy.

Goalie Rotation

Splitting starts between your goaltenders is its own decision, especially across a Friday/Saturday weekend series where a single goalie playing both nights is a real fatigue risk. Your Assistant Coach shapes this too — with a clear #1 on your roster, a good assistant rides him harder; a thinner gap between your two goalies gets ridden closer to an even split. A weak or absent assistant defaults toward a flatter rotation regardless of the actual talent gap in your crease. This runs alongside the ice-time tools above and can be delegated to staff the same way. A backup buried too deep behind a workhorse starter feels it, too — see Team Chemistry & Player Happiness.

In-Game Lineup Fixer

If a moderate or severe injury pulls one of your players out of a game in progress, you're not stuck with a plain automatic same-position swap — a Fix Lineup option opens immediately, letting you manually reassign anyone healthy on your bench to any line or pair, or hit Auto-Fix to re-run the same solver Auto-Configure uses against whoever's actually left available.

Special Teams

Penalties happen dynamically as a game plays out, and a team riding strong momentum draws them a little less often. Once one is called, the offending team drops to its penalty kill unit while the other team's power play unit takes over — build your real difference-makers into your top PP1/PK1 units, since those are who actually takes the ice when it matters. An ordinary minor penalty ends the instant the power-play team scores; a major penalty (a fight or a serious misconduct call) runs its entire length no matter what happens on the ensuing power play. See Injuries & Discipline for how majors and ejections happen in the first place.