NHL Fantasy Hockey Defenseman Rankings 2025–26

1 · VORP baseline. CaliberScore measures value above replacement — the 60th-percentile player at each position — not above the league average. This anchors rankings to what is actually available on waivers, not to a theoretical mid-pack player.

2 · Robust spread. Long-tail stats like HIT, BLK, PIM and SHO use IQR / 1.35 for spread instead of standard deviation. This stops elite shot-blockers and hit leaders from being clipped by outlier-heavy distributions.

3 · Category scarcity weights. Each category is weighted by 1 / CV(top_N) — rare production like goals counts more than common production like hits. Weights normalize so they sum to the number of active categories, preserving relative scoring scale.

4 · Positional scarcity. Defensemen receive no positional bonus. BLK already rewards block-heavy D, and adding a positional multiplier double-counts them above elite forwards. D-men rank on stats alone.

5 · ADP-anchored goalie scaling. Goalies and skaters live on different statistical scales by default. CaliberScore applies an affine transform that maps the #1 goalie to roughly the #20 skater and the #24 goalie to a replacement-level skater — so the two pools can be compared directly in head-to-head trades.