Draft Day

How to use ChirpIQX while you draft — on Yahoo, ESPN, Sleeper, CBS, or anywhere else. ChirpIQX does not connect to your league, so it does not care which platform you use. You draft in your league's room and keep ChirpIQX beside it as the advisor.

The short version

1. Before the draft, build a schedule tiebreaker sheet with schedule_value
2. During the draft, paste picks in batches and ask chirp_draft_pick who to take
3. After the draft, paste your roster once with set_roster and everything else works

Most of the value is in step 1, because that is the part with no clock on it.

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Before the draft

Find your playoff weeks

Your league settings will tell you which weeks are the fantasy playoffs — commonly the last three weeks of the season. Note the first and last week number. Everything below gets sharper once ChirpIQX knows them.

Build the schedule sheet

"Rate all 32 NHL clubs for fantasy playoff weeks 22 to 24."

You get every club scored on total games, four-game weeks, light weeks, back-to-backs, and — the part a public draft kit cannot give you — games during your playoff weeks.

A real example from the 2026-27 season:

	Playoff-window games	Four-game weeks
OTT, CHI, PIT	11	8–9
SEA, COL, SJS, LAK, BUF	10	8–11
STL, FLA, UTA, CGY	8	6–7

That is a three-game spread across the weeks that decide your season. When two players are close, it is the tiebreaker.

The nuance worth catching

SEA and SJS have fewer playoff-window games than Ottawa, but far more four-game weeks across the whole season — 11 and 10 against Ottawa's 8. Different edge. Ottawa wins March; Seattle wins the twenty weeks before it. If you are drafting a player you intend to stream around, that flips the recommendation.

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During the draft

Ask for a pick

"I'm on the clock at pick 12. My playoff weeks are 22 to 24. Who should I take?"

 5. Mark Scheifele   WPG C    playoff gms 9
 6. Nick Suzuki      MTL C    playoff gms 9
 8. Martin Necas     COL C    playoff gms 10

The number is the player's rank by last season's production. 5. means the fifth-best producer in the pool is still available at pick 12.

Keep the board honest

Paste picks as they happen. Copy them straight out of your draft room — pick numbers, clubs and positions around the name are all fine:

"These are gone:1. (1) Connor McDavid EDM - C2. (2) Nathan MacKinnon COL - C3. (3) Cale Makar COL - D"

Names resolve against live NHL rosters, so accents, Lastname, Firstname, punctuation and bracketed text all work. Anything that cannot be matched to exactly one player is reported back under drafted_not_matched rather than quietly ignored — an unmatched pick means a drafted player is still on your board.

Work in batches, not one pick at a time

Under a 60-second clock you will not keep up pick-by-pick. Paste a block between your own turns instead. Most draft rooms have a results panel you can select and copy wholesale, which is exactly what this is built for.

If your draft is slow or offline

Email drafts, slow drafts and offline drafts give you hours per pick. ChirpIQX is at its best there — you can work through the full board, check schedules and compare candidates properly every turn.

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After the draft

Paste your roster once:

"Set my roster: [paste your team]"

From then on, the whole toolset works — ice, optimize_lineup, get_games_in_hand, compare_matchup and the rest. See Getting Started.

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What ChirpIQX cannot tell you

Worth being straight about, so you do not lean on something that is not there:

Not available	Why
Projections for next season	ChirpIQX reports last completed season. It does not forecast
ADP or market value	There is no public source of draft-market consensus
Who is available in your league	Ownership is league-private. Pool tools say "not on the rosters you provided", which is not the same thing
Line combinations, power-play units	The NHL does not publish them
Injury status	No public feed

Everything ChirpIQX does report — games, schedules, statistics, standings — is fetched from the NHL's public API and named with the season it came from.