NHL lines

How these lines are built

Hockey doesn't publish a depth chart. Coaches post line rushes at the morning skate, reporters relay them, and by the second period half of them have been blended anyway. So we don't guess. Every card above comes from the NHL's own shift chart for that club's most recent 2026-27 game: every shift every player took, to the second.

From those shifts we rebuild who was on the ice together at every moment of the game. Only five-on-five time counts toward a line or a pair — both clubs at full strength, both goalies in. Power plays, penalty kills, four-on-four, three-on-three overtime and empty-net time are all cut out, because a top unit on the man advantage says nothing about who a coach rolls at even strength. The trio of forwards that shared the most five-on-five ice is the first line. Take them out, and the trio that shared the most of what's left is the second. Same for defense pairs, three deep. The number beside each line is how long that exact group was on together.

Power-play units are measured the same way, from power-play time only: PP1 is the five who shared the most of it, PP2 the best group that isn't mostly PP1 again. Goalies come straight from the boxscore — the starter first, with his ice time.

Read it as what happened, not as a forecast. One game is one game. A blowout shortens the bench, an injury in the first period scrambles everything after it, and a coach chasing a goal will double-shift his best center. When a forward logged real time on another line, the card says so underneath. A club that dressed eleven forwards and seven defensemen can't fill four honest trios, so the spare skaters are listed as “also dressed” rather than forced into a line they didn't play.

The league posts shift charts a while after the final horn. Until a chart accounts for the ice time the boxscore says was played, we don't trust it: the card falls back to grouping players by total ice time, marks itself By TOI, and drops the shared-time column. That's an ordering by minutes, not a deployment. It fixes itself within the hour once the full chart is up.