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How Much Do Linemates Matter? Splitting NHL Scoring Into the Spot and the Player
Put a depth forward beside Connor McDavid and his points jump. We measured how big that jump is, how much of a top-line winger’s scoring comes with the spot, and whether that has changed since the 1960s. Along the way, the usual shortcut for finding old linemates turned out to mislead.
By Edgehalla ResearchPublished 11 min read
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The short answer: how much do linemates matter?
Less than fantasy managers hope, more than nothing. When a forward is moved onto a star’s line, he scores more, but he does not turn into the player he replaced. The spot is worth roughly a third of a top-line winger’s even-strength points. The rest is the winger.
A promotion lifts a forward’s scoring 21% on average and about 50% for depth players once their normal bounce-back is removed, but fill-ins still produce only 82% of the regular they replace.
This piece is part of our NHL GOAT series. It started as one question for the GOAT article: did Wayne Gretzky’s linemates make him, or did he make them?
The Podkolzin effect
Vasily Podkolzin is the cleanest recent example. In 2024-25 he scored 0.55 even-strength points a game in the games he spent 10+ minutes beside McDavid or Leon Draisaitl, and 0.15 in the games he did not. That is a 3.7× split.
Vasily Podkolzin: with and away from Edmonton’s stars
Even-strength points per game
Podkolzin scored 0.55 even-strength points a game beside McDavid or Draisaitl in 2024-25, and 0.15 away from them.
- With McDavid or Draisaitl
- Away from them
He also got more ice time with them, 14.3 minutes against 12.6. In 2026-27 he opened on the top line and first power-play unit, with 9 points in his first 6 games. Small samples, so treat it as a story. The question is whether the league-wide numbers back it up.
What 6,054 line vacancies show
We took every game from 2017-18 to 2025-26 where one of a team’s top two forwards played without one of his two regular linemates. Real shift data told us who took the empty spot. That gave 6,054 games in 730 stretches, enough to compare each fill-in with his own usual rate and with the regular he replaced.
- The fill-in scored 21% more even-strength points than his usual rate (90% range: 17%–25%).
- He played about 15% more even-strength minutes, which explains most of that bump.
- Even so, he produced only 82% of the missing regular’s scoring (79%–86%).
- On the power play the drop was bigger: fill-ins kept 65% of the regular’s points.
- The star himself scored about 9% less at even strength without his regular linemate.
The bump depends on who gets promoted
Depth forwards gain the most from a promotion
Fill-ins on a star’s line, split by their usual scoring rate (2017-18 to 2025-26)
Depth forwards scored 1.71 times their usual rate when promoted, but still produced only 70% of the regular they replaced; top-third fill-ins barely changed and matched the regular.
- Promotion bump
- Share of the regular’s scoring
A depth forward’s scoring jumps by 71% when he is promoted, far more than his extra 20% of ice time. Part of that is a bounce-back: a forward picked off a cold stretch would score more anyway. Comparing with similar forwards who were not promoted, the real bump is about 1.5× for depth forwards, 1.18× for the middle six and 1.06× for top scorers. Playing beside a star creates chances a fourth-liner never sees. A forward who already scores at a good rate gains little, because he was already getting those chances. The full breakdown is in our Prop Lab piece on who benefits from a top-line injury.
The spot vs the player
Put the two together and a fill-in’s scoring on the line works out to about 0.37 × the regular’s rate + 0.64 × his own rate. In plain terms, about a third of a top-line winger’s even-strength scoring comes with the spot. Two thirds is the player. Odd and even seasons give the same split (0.80 vs 0.84 for the share of the regular’s scoring kept).
Middle-six forwards, adjusted for ice time
Part of the gap between lines is just minutes. From 1997-98 (when ice-time records start) to 2025-26, middle-six forwards scored 64% of the top line’s even-strength points per game, but 77% per 60 minutes. The top line also gets about twice the power-play time, and 72% of top-line forwards play on the first unit, against 14% of the middle six.
Some middle-six forwards already score like top-liners per minute. How many, and do they keep it up? We counted middle-six forwards with 60+ games whose even-strength scoring per 60 minutes reached the median top-liner’s.
Hidden top-liners are getting rarer
Share of middle-six forwards scoring at the median top-liner’s even-strength rate per 60 minutes
The share of middle-six forwards scoring at top-line rates per 60 minutes fell from 21% in 1997–2004 to 12% since 2015.
Their scoring rate was mostly real. The next season, those forwards scored 2.04 even-strength points per 60, against 1.64 for other middle-six forwards (433 and 1,770 player-seasons). Yet only 32% of them were promoted to the top line the next year.
The falling share says coaches sort their forwards more sharply than they did 25 years ago. Fewer top-line scorers are stuck lower in the lineup. That fits what we see in the vacancies: today’s regular usually out-scores the next forward up.
Finding linemates before shift data: plus-minus misleads
Shift data only goes back to the 2000s, and in our database to 2017-18. To ask whether any of this has changed since the 1960s, we needed another way to find who played with whom.
We tried two. Plus-minus: linemates are on the ice for the same goals, so their game-by-game plus-minus moves together. Assists: linemates score and assist on each other’s goals. We scored both against real shift data from 2017-18 to 2025-26 (1,136 regular linemates).
Both methods find the right linemates. Only one gets the answer right.
Fill-in’s share of the regular’s even-strength scoring, 2017-18 to 2025-26
Linemates found by plus-minus make fill-ins look like they keep 93% of the regular’s scoring; assist-based linemates give 81%, close to the 82% from real shift data.
Both find about 80% of the real linemates. The difference is in the misses. When plus-minus gets it wrong, it tends to pick a lower-scoring forward, so the "regular" looks easier to replace. When assists get it wrong, they lean the other way, but much less. Against shift data, the assist version lands within a point of the truth.
That matters because our first pass at this history, and the first version of the GOAT article, used plus-minus. It suggested fill-ins in the 1970s and 1980s matched the regulars they replaced. We rebuilt it with assists, from the NHL’s scoring summaries back to 1959-60.
Has the value of a linemate changed since the 1960s?
With assist-based linemates we found 1,945 line vacancies with 10 or more games, covering every season from 1959-60 to 2025-26. To keep the fill-in honest, we picked him on half the vacancy games and measured him on the other half.
Fill-ins never matched the regular. The gap grew once, in the 1990s.
Fill-ins on a star’s line, by era (assist-based linemates)
From 1959 to 1992 the next forward up normally scored about 82% of the regular’s rate; from 1992 on it has been 75–77%. The promotion bump stayed between 1.04 and 1.13 throughout.
- Promotion bump
- Fill-in’s usual rate ÷ regular
- The promotion bump has not changed. Moving up a line added 4% to 13% in every era.
- The regular was always better than his replacement. From the 1960s to 1992 the next forward up normally scored about 82% of the regular’s rate. Plus-minus had put that near 100%.
- The gap stepped down once. From 1992 to 2004 the next forward was at 75%, then 77%, and today he is at 75%. That is a one-time change, not a steady slide: about −1.8% per decade overall (90% range −3.1% to −0.6%).
- It replicates. Splitting the seasons into odd and even years gives the same old-vs-modern difference in both halves.
Our first, plus-minus version said the gap opened from nothing to 20% and kept widening, about −4.8% per decade. The assist version keeps the direction but halves the size. Lines have always had a pecking order. It got a little steeper in the early 1990s, around the time the league grew from 21 to 26 teams and the first big wave of Soviet and Czech players arrived. Our data cannot say which of those mattered.
Did Gretzky need his linemates?
The flip side is the star. When a top forward loses one of his regular linemates, his own even-strength scoring dips by about 11% on average across all eras (2,927 vacancies). Most of the greats dipped less.
Stars without a regular linemate
Even-strength scoring when a regular linemate was out, as % of normal (assist-based linemates)
Crosby and Messier kept 101%, McDavid 98% and Gretzky 95% of their even-strength scoring without a regular linemate; Lemieux (91%) and Ovechkin (89%) dipped like a typical top forward, and Brett Hull fell to 76%.
So no, Gretzky did not need Jari Kurri: 95% of his usual rate over 382 games without a regular linemate, inside the noise of 100%. McDavid, Crosby, Messier and Jagr look the same. Lemieux and Ovechkin dipped about as much as a typical star. The clear exception is Brett Hull, a pure finisher who lost a quarter of his even-strength scoring without his regular linemate. None of this changes the GOAT rankings.
What it means
- A spot on a star’s line is worth something, not everything. About a third of a top-line winger’s scoring travels with the job.
- Depth forwards gain the most from a promotion, about 1.5× their usual rate once the bounce-back is removed. That is the fantasy add when a top-liner goes down.
- Per minute, the middle six is closer to the top line than per game. But fewer middle-six forwards score at top-line rates than 25 years ago.
- The pecking order is old. Regulars out-scored their replacements in every era since 1959; the gap grew once, in the early 1990s, and has held.
- Gretzky and McDavid did not need their linemates. Both kept their usual scoring without a regular linemate. Brett Hull did need his.
- Be careful with plus-minus as a linemate finder. It points at the right players but flatters whoever replaces them.
Show the work
- Tests written down
- Not in advance (exploratory)
- Results computed
Modern: every regular-season game 2017-18 to 2025-26 where one of a team’s top-2 forwards (points per game, 40+ games) played without one of his two most-shared even-strength linemates; fill-in from shift data; 90% ranges from 1,000 resamples of stretches. History: same design 1959-60 to 2025-26 with linemates from shared even-strength goals in NHL scoring summaries; fill-ins picked on half the vacancy games and measured on the other half. Tiers: forwards with half a season or more for one team, 1997-98 to 2025-26, ranked by even-strength ice time.
| Test | Result | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Promotion lifts a forward’s scoring | +21% (90%: +17% to +25%); depth forwards 1.71× raw, 1.50× net of bounce-back; 6,054 games | Real |
| Fill-ins match the regular they replace | 82% of the regular’s even-strength scoring (79%–86%) | No |
| The split replicates | Odd vs even seasons: 0.84 vs 0.80 kept; bump 1.22 vs 1.19 | Replicates |
| Plus-minus finds old linemates | 79.7% of true linemates, but 93% kept vs true 82% | Biased |
| Assists find old linemates | 80.8% of true linemates; 81% kept vs true 82% | Validated (2017–2026) |
| Fill-ins matched regulars before the 1990s | Assist linemates: 82% of the regular’s rate 1959–92 (plus-minus said ~100%) | No |
| The gap below the top line grew | −1.8% per decade (90%: −3.1% to −0.6%); 0.82 → 0.75, a step in the early 1990s | Real, modest |
| Old vs modern gap replicates | 1959–92 vs 1992–2026: even seasons 0.80 vs 0.75; odd 0.85 vs 0.76 | Replicates |
| The promotion bump changed over time | −0.5% per decade (90%: −1.7% to +0.8%) | No |
| Gretzky needed his linemates | 95% of normal without a regular (83%–107%, 382 games) | No |
| Brett Hull needed his linemates | 76% of normal without a regular (69%–85%, 297 games) | Yes |
| High-rate middle-six forwards keep it up | 2.04 vs 1.64 EV points per 60 next season (433 vs 1,770) | Mostly real |
Download the result tables
- Line vacancies by era (CSV): Fill-in bump, share of the regular kept and gap, by era and linemate method.
- Top line vs middle six (CSV): Even-strength points per game and per 60, ice time and PP1 share by tier, 1997–2026.
Aggregated results only, free to reuse with credit (CC BY 4.0).
Frequently asked questions
Does playing with Connor McDavid inflate a player’s points?
Yes, but by less than it looks. A typical forward moved onto a star’s line scores about 21% more at even strength, and a depth forward about 1.5× his usual rate. Vasily Podkolzin scored 0.55 even-strength points a game beside McDavid or Draisaitl in 2024-25, against 0.15 away from them.
How much of a top-line winger’s scoring comes from his linemates?
About a third. When a top-line regular is out, his replacement’s even-strength scoring works out to roughly 0.37 times the regular’s rate plus 0.64 times his own. The rest belongs to the player.
Should I pick up a player who gets promoted to the first line?
Often, especially a depth forward. Promoted fill-ins average 1.2 times their usual even-strength scoring, and depth players about 1.5 times after their normal bounce-back. Expect around 80% of the injured regular’s production, not all of it, and less on the power play.
Did Wayne Gretzky need Jari Kurri?
No. In 382 games where one of Gretzky’s regular linemates was out, he kept 95% of his usual even-strength scoring, within noise of 100%. A typical top forward kept 89%. Connor McDavid kept 98% and Sidney Crosby 101%.
How do you know who played on a line before shift data?
From scoring summaries: linemates score and assist on each other’s goals. That method finds about 81% of the real regular linemates on modern seasons and gets the replacement numbers right. Matching players by game-by-game plus-minus finds as many but flatters the replacements.
More in Skaters
Sources and method
- NHL stats (NHL.com), every season since 1917-18
- NHL API reference (community documentation)
- Bootstrap resampling
Research and analysis, not betting advice. Past results do not guarantee future returns; bet only what you can afford to lose.