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.

Gameplan splits this work across five tabs — Lines (forward lines and defense pairs), Goalies, Special Teams, System, and Ice Time — all in the same scrolling row of tabs at the top, so switching between "who's my starter" and "who's on the top power play unit" is one tap, not a scroll through a single long list.

Reading a Line's Formation Card

Tap a line or pair on the Lines tab and it expands into a small rink diagram: your players sit roughly where they'd line up on the ice, a colored line connects them (green when the archetypes click, red when it's three of a kind — see Team Chemistry), and a badge in the middle shows that line's own 0–99 rating. That number is built from the exact same math as the Offense/Defense numbers at the top of the screen, just for one line or pair instead of your whole roster — so if a swap tanks a line's badge, you'll see the same drop reflected up top. A line or pair missing a player also takes a real hit to its badge, not just a rating computed from whoever happens to be dressed — an open slot on your top line is never free. Everything else you're not currently editing collapses to a single summary row (avatars, names, rating, a chemistry dot) so the screen stays scannable instead of growing as long as your depth chart.

An out-of-position player gets flagged right on their spot in the formation, with the real cost spelled out underneath instead of just a warning icon — for example, exactly how much offense a center pushed out to the wing is actually costing that line.

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 tapping it again hoping for something different. See Support Staff.

If a real shortage leaves you without enough of one position — a rash of injuries or suspensions at forward or defense, or a roster that just never carried enough bodies at one spot — Auto-Configure will move someone across from the other group as a last resort rather than leave a slot empty, at a real cost to that line's rating (a defenseman playing forward, or vice versa, is a bigger fit penalty than any same-group reshuffle). This clears itself up automatically once you're no longer short — the AI rebuilds its lines from scratch every week regardless, and if you have Delegate to Staff's Auto Lines on, so does your team; otherwise, just re-run Auto-Configure once the shortage passes.

You can make the same call yourself: during a real shortage, the manual line editor's player picker for an open slot also offers players from the other position group, not just same-position options. And wherever you see a team's lines laid out — yours or an opponent's, on their team page — a player parked outside his natural position is tagged "OOP · <position>" so it reads as a deliberate emergency move, not a mistake.

The player picker leads with impact, not just talent. Tap a slot and the sheet's default sort — "Best Impact" — ranks every candidate by exactly how much your line's rating badge would move if you made that swap, not just raw Overall. You'll also see a chemistry preview for the resulting trio and a flag if the candidate is already starting somewhere else, before you commit to anything. "Best Fit" and "Overall" are still there if you'd rather sort a different way.

Filling an empty slot shows that candidate's resulting line rating directly (e.g. "→ 74") instead of a +/- number — an empty slot's own rating only reflects whoever's already dressed, so comparing against it would make almost any realistic fill look like a downgrade even though completing the line is always the right move. Swapping a player who's already in the slot still shows a true +/- delta, since that comparison is between two complete lines.

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.

System — Your Default In-Game Strategy

The System tab sets your team's default Forecheck and Offensive Bias — the same two dials you can also adjust live from the Tactics panel mid-game. Whatever you leave selected here is what your team plays with from puck drop until you (or your delegated staff) change it live. See How a Game Plays Out's "Your In-Game Tactics" for what each option actually does on the ice. Like the two tools above, your Assistant Coach can suggest a setup here, and Delegate to Staff can keep it current for you automatically — 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.

Fatigue tracks who's actually playing the minutes. Across a full season, your top-end talent — the stars logging heavy shifts on your top line and pairing — finishes with roughly three times the average season fatigue of your deepest bench players, and a real share of them cross into the range where the happiness penalty starts to bite. Your depth players, by contrast, mostly finish the year barely touched by it. That's exactly why a bye week's Rest option is worth aiming at your top line and top pairing specifically, rather than spreading it evenly across the roster — they're the ones actually accumulating the toll.

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.

The dot on each goalie's avatar in the Goalies tab means something different than it does everywhere else on Gameplan: for skaters it tracks season-long workload, but for your goalies it tracks whether they're actually fresh for the next start — green means ready, orange/red means a tired night in the crease is a live risk. A fatigued goalie plays a little worse across the board, but archetype decides where it bites hardest: an Acrobatic goalie's reflexes fade the most when tired and he's the shakiest of the three on the penalty kill, trading that for the sharpest reflexes in a shootout; a Butterfly goalie is the steadiest option when worn down and the most reliable shorthanded, at a small cost to his shootout edge; Hybrid splits the difference across the board. Worth weighing archetype, not just talent, when you decide who starts a tired second night.

How much any of that actually shows up depends on a goalie's Composure — see Attributes, Archetypes & Ratings for what it does and how to develop it. A high-composure goalie leans harder into his archetype's strengths and shrugs off its weak spot; a low-composure one barely shows his style at all, tired or not. Two Acrobatic goalies on your roster can feel completely different in a shootout for exactly this reason.

In-Game Lineup Fixer

If a moderate or severe injury pulls one of your players out of a game in progress, the game pauses and asks you to make a call — it won't quietly play on without you. You can either open Fix Lineup or explicitly tap Continue Without Changes to stick with the automatic same-position swap the game already made for you; either way, the sim won't resume on its own until you've picked one.

Opening Fix Lineup shows you exactly what happened: an Injuries This Game list at the top names every player you've lost so far and which line or pair they were skating on, so you're never guessing where the hole is. Below that, each line and pair shows a quality rating, and any player who's moved into a spot they didn't start the game in — the automatic replacement, or a move you made earlier — is flagged with an orange IN tag. From there you can manually reassign anyone healthy on your bench to any line or pair (picking a replacement shows how much that swap would help or hurt the line's rating, not just their raw overall), or hit Auto-Fix to re-run the same solver Auto-Configure uses against whoever's actually left available. Unlike a full Auto-Configure Lineup pass, Auto-Fix always returns that solver's optimal result — it isn't gated by your Assistant Coach's quality the way a normal Auto-Configure run is.

Special Teams

Penalties happen dynamically as a game plays out — a more physical on-ice unit draws them more often, and a team riding strong momentum draws them a little less. 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. A genuinely strong unit performs meaningfully above average at its job, and a weak one falls meaningfully below it — this isn't a token label on the roster screen. 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.

A penalty-killing unit plays a defense-first box, not a scoring threat — its own offense is deliberately suppressed while shorthanded, so a shorthanded goal is a real but rare bonus, not something to plan around. That asymmetry is also why a strong penalty kill matters just as much as a strong power play: survival, not counter-attack, is the job.

The Special Teams tab lays PP1/PP2/PK1/PK2 out the same way Lines does — a small formation with a centered rating badge — but that badge isn't your skaters' Overall. A power play is rated on shooting, passing, and skating; a penalty kill on defending, skating, and physicality, so a shutdown defenseman can show a lower number on the power play than his Overall suggests, and a higher one on the kill — that's the unit-specific rating doing its job, not an error. On top of that talent blend, the badge also credits real chemistry — the same archetype-fit synergy that colors a Lines formation card, applied to whichever pairing actually has one: a power play's badge draws on both its forward trio's fit and its D pair's, while a penalty kill (with only two forwards on the ice) draws on its D pair's fit alone. Either way, the badge also dings a unit that isn't fully dressed, so a 2-of-5 power play doesn't rate as high as a genuinely complete one. Your team's overall Penalty Kill number (on the ratings strip at the top of Gameplan) also credits your starting goaltender, on top of the skaters themselves.

Tapping a cell to change who's on a unit works the same way Lines' player picker does: "Best Impact" is the default sort, ranking every eligible skater by exactly how much that unit's badge would move if you made the swap, with "Overall" available if you'd rather sort by raw talent instead.

Power-play talent concentrates at the top of the sport; penalty kill is far more even. Across the league, a blue-blood program's power play typically converts several percentage points higher than a rebuilding program's — special-teams firepower clusters with prestige much like blue-chip recruiting talent does. Penalty-kill rates, by contrast, land in roughly the same band regardless of tier — a well-drilled shorthanded unit built on structure and effort is realistic at almost any program, even one that can't yet recruit a marquee power-play weapon. If you're rebuilding, a disciplined penalty kill is an identity you can build around well before your power play catches up.