Remember Some Guys

There is a new thing on this site: a daily puzzle. One hand-picked skater a day. You get their career, drawn as a line, with the years filed off — and you have to work out who it is.

Go play today's, then come back if you want to know how it works and why it is built the way it is.

What you're actually looking at

The line is one number per season: GAA/60 — goals above league average per 60 minutes of 5v5. It is the accounting sum of a skater's value, adding up the chances they create, the chances they suppress, and their finishing. Zero is a league-average player. It is not a new stat invented for the game; it is exactly the curve on every career page, byte for byte, with the season labels redacted.

The grey bands behind it are the league that same season — the middle half brighter, the 5th to 95th percentile faint, a dashed line at the median. So where a point sits inside the bands literally is its percentile, and the ordinal printed above each marker makes it exact. A season below the display floor (about 300 minutes of 5v5) draws as an open circle with no rank: the line is the career, but we don't claim a percentile off a handful of shifts.

The default view averages each point over a trailing three-season window, because single-season on-ice numbers are noisy enough that the year-to-year wobble would drown the shape you're supposed to be reading. There's a single-season toggle if you want the raw, jagged version.

How the scoring works

You start with five goal lights. There are three clues, and each one costs you some of them:

Position — 1 light. Forward or defenseman, and only that. Centre, left wing and right wing all read "Forward," so you can't back the exact spot out of it.
Career span — 1 light. The real years, which also un-redacts the x-axis: S1, S2, S3 become actual seasons.
Team history — 2 lights. Every team in order across the career.

Guesses are unlimited and free. That's deliberate. A wrong guess costs you nothing but a moment — the only way to lose points is to buy information. So the game is not "can you get it in six," it's "how little can you pay to be sure?" Name the skater and you bank whatever lights are left.

Miss a day and it stays in the archive; you can page back and play any of them. There's no streak, no score history, nothing stored on your device. Whether replays should "count" is an open question we haven't decided.

Why the teasers are useless on purpose

Every puzzle carries a one-line teaser above the chart. It is free, which means it has to give away almost nothing — a feeling, not a fact. Something you only really get after you've solved it.

The first draft of the slate broke this rule completely. It was written as trivia: draft position, an award, a record. Every line read fine and every line was a fourth clue wearing a joke's clothes. Take a player who has lost the Stanley Cup Final with four different teams — writing that narrows the field to about six people, which is the job of the priced clues, not the free one. The version that survived was "you would not want him at your wedding."

The whole slate got rewritten on that principle. It also had a side benefit nobody planned: an impressionistic teaser makes almost no checkable factual claim, so there is nothing in it to get wrong.

Choosing the guys

Selection is hand-done, never random, on a dated slate a human edits. Random would be terrible, because most careers are a flat line near zero and the shape is the puzzle. What we're looking for:

Guessable. The autocomplete spans about 680 skaters. If the answer isn't in there, the game is unfair.
A curve with a shape. A climb from a below-average rookie season to superstardom is a story you can read off the chart. A flat line only works when the flatness is itself the joke — sixteen consecutive seasons of being almost exactly league average is, honestly, its own kind of remarkable.
A ramp. Recognisable names early, cult figures later, and no two adjacent days leaning on the same trick.

One constraint worth naming, because it makes the title a bit of a lie: the pool is currently active players. Career pages exist for skaters on the Players table, and that table is this season's league. So it is "Remember Some Guys" for guys who are still going. Genuine deep cuts from 2011 need a corpus change, not a slate change.

Two small things we were careful about

The answer isn't in the page source. It's base64-encoded and only decoded in your browser at the moment you get it right, so View Source doesn't spoil it. The social poster that publishes the daily card never decodes it either — there's a test that pins that, so no caption bug can ever leak an answer.

The card and the page can't disagree. The image posted each morning is generated by reading the puzzle back out of the already-built page, rather than recomputing it. If the site hasn't been rebuilt, the poster says so and posts nothing, instead of inventing a puzzle that doesn't exist on the site.

Puzzle #1 went up on 20 July 2026. A new skater lands every day. Today's is here.