NHL Trade Glossary

NHL trades come with their own vocabulary, and so do the grades and analytics on this site. These are the terms you'll run into most, in plain English.

Trades

Trade: A deal in which two or more NHL teams exchange assets: players, draft picks, the rights to a player, cash, or some combination. Every trade on the site lists exactly what each side gave up and received.
Multi-Team Trade: A trade involving three or more teams. Assets can move in several directions at once, so the site lays out what each team sent and received to keep the whole deal easy to read.
Player Rights: The exclusive ability to sign a particular player. Rights can be traded even when the player isn't under an NHL contract, such as an unsigned draft pick or a pending free agent.
Retained Salary: Part of a traded player's salary that the original team keeps paying, and that keeps counting against its salary cap. Retaining salary makes a player easier to move and shows up in many deadline deals.
Future Considerations: A placeholder for a return that wasn't settled at the time of the trade. It's worked out later and can turn into a pick, a player or cash, or sometimes nothing at all.
Cash Considerations: Money included in a trade, on its own or alongside other assets. In smaller deals, cash is sometimes the entire return.
Loan: A temporary move of a player to another club, most often to or from a league outside the NHL. The original team usually keeps the player's rights.
Trade Partner: Another team a franchise has traded with. A team's most frequent partners can reveal long-running relationships between front offices.

Draft picks

Draft Pick: The right to make a selection at a specific point in an NHL Draft. Picks are valuable assets in their own right and are often traded years before the draft they belong to.
Round and Overall: The draft is split into rounds, with each team selecting once per round. A pick's overall number is its position across the whole draft, so in a 32-team league the 33rd overall pick is the first selection of the second round.
Conditional Pick: A pick that only changes hands, or changes in value, if a condition is met: a team reaching a playoff round, a player hitting a games-played mark, or a player re-signing. Until the condition resolves, where the pick ends up is uncertain.
Ownership Chain: Every team that has held a single draft pick, in order. Because picks can be traded several times, the chain shows the path from the original owner to the team that finally used it.
Compensatory Pick: A pick a team is awarded under league rules, for example after failing to sign a previous first-round selection, rather than one it acquired in a trade.
Forfeited or Voided Pick: A pick a team no longer gets to use. A forfeited pick was taken away under league rules; a voided pick is one whose conditions meant it never changed hands.

Contracts

Cap Hit (AAV): A contract's average annual value: its total value divided by its years. This is the amount that counts against a team's salary cap each season.
Entry-Level Contract (ELC): The first NHL contract a young player signs. Its length and pay are capped by the league's collective bargaining agreement.
Two-Way Contract: A contract that pays one salary while the player is in the NHL and a lower one while he is in the minors.
RFA and UFA: When a contract ends, a restricted free agent (RFA) can negotiate with other teams, but his team can match any offer or receive draft-pick compensation. An unrestricted free agent (UFA) is free to sign anywhere.

Grades and analytics

Trade Grade: A letter grade for each team in a trade, given the day it happens, based on what that team gave up and what it got back. Grades are part of All-Access.
Realized Outcome: How a trade actually aged. Once every player in the deal has played it out and every pick has been used, we measure which side got more on the ice. A trade can look lopsided on paper and turn out even, or the other way around.
Deal Size: How big a trade is, from Notable up through Headline, Blockbuster and Era-Defining. It reflects the stature of the players and picks involved, not which side won.
WAR (Wins Above Replacement): How many wins a player adds compared with a replacement-level player, the kind any team could find in the minors or on waivers. It puts skaters and goalies on one scale.
Trade Value: What a player is worth as a trade asset right now, weighing how good he is, his age and his contract.
Surplus Value: How much more a player contributes than his contract pays him for. A star on a cheap deal has a lot of it; an aging player on a big deal can have none.
Archetype: The kind of player someone is, such as a two-way center or a stay-at-home defenseman, based on how he plays across several areas of the game, season by season.
Expected Goals (xG): The number of goals a set of shots would usually produce, based on the quality of the chances. Comparing actual goals with xG shows who finishes, or stops, better than expected.
Goals Saved Above Expected (GSAx): How many more goals a goalie stopped than an average goalie would have, given the quality of the shots he faced.
Elo Rating: A rating of team strength that rises with wins and falls with losses. We use it to set what a team was expected to do each season, and coaches are measured against that expectation.