--- title: "How Player Score is Calculated for the Three Stars" description: "Every weight in the Star Score that picks the three stars of an EASHL match, what changed in the September 2026 recalibration and why, and what the score deliberately leaves out." canonical: https://chelhead.com/blog/how-player-score-is-calculated-for-three-stars/ last-updated: 2026-09-14 --- # How Player Score is Calculated for the Three Stars > Every weight in the Star Score that picks the three stars of an EASHL match, what changed in the September 2026 recalibration and why, and what the score deliberately leaves out. Published 2025-07-08 · Updated 2026-09-14 by ChelHead Team ## What the Three Stars are Every match report on ChelHead ends with a Three Stars podium. The stars are not picked by hand and they are not EA's end-of-game letter grades. Every player in the game, on both teams, gets a Star Score computed from the stats EA records for that game; the scores are sorted, and the top three are the stars. The same number appears as Gamescore in a player's game log and trends. It is one metric with two names. This post lays out exactly what goes into the score, what changed in September 2026 and why, and what the score deliberately does not try to do. ## Skater scoring A skater's Star Score is a weighted sum of their counting stats from the game. The weights: ### Scoring - **Goals:** 4 points each. - **Assists:** 3 points each. - **Shots on net:** 0.3 points each. - **Plus/minus:** 0.5 points per goal of plus/minus as EA records it. With no line changes in EASHL this is largely a team-level term: it rewards being on the side that outscored the other. ### Puck management - **Possession:** 0.25 points per minute with the puck. Added in September 2026; see below. - **Giveaways:** 0.1 points deducted each. - **Takeaways:** 0.25 points each. - **Interceptions:** 0.5 points each. ### Defence and discipline - **Blocked shots:** 0.5 points each. - **Hits:** 0.05 points each. - **Faceoffs:** 0.2 points per net win (wins minus losses). A centre who goes 12 for 20 earns 0.8; one who goes 8 for 20 loses 0.8. - **Penalties drawn:** 0.3 points each. - **Penalty minutes:** 0.2 points deducted per minute, so a minor costs 0.4. Worked example: a 3v3 centre with 2 goals, 1 assist, 7 shots, 7 minutes of possession, 6 giveaways, 3 takeaways, 1 interception, 9 of 15 faceoffs, 4 hits and a plus-2 scores 8 + 3 + 2.1 + 1.75 + 0.75 + 0.5 + 0.6 + 0.2 + 1 for the positives and loses 0.6 for the giveaways, a Star Score of 17.3. ## Goalie scoring Goalies are scored on their own scale, then ranked on the same podium as the skaters. The goalie weights are set so that a solid 3v3 workload lands in the same range as a good skater night. - **Saves:** 1.2 points each. - **Breakaway saves:** 4 points each. - **Penalty shot saves:** 4 points each. - **Goals against:** 2 points deducted each. - **Save percentage bonus:** 0.5 points for every percentage point above .800. A .900 night adds 5, a .950 night adds 7.5, and anything at or below .800 adds nothing. - **Shutout:** 20 points for zero goals against while facing at least one shot. Twenty saves on twenty shots therefore scores 24 + 10 + 20 = 54, which is why a goalie who steals a game is regularly the First Star. ## What is deliberately left out EA's Offense, Defense and Teamplay ratings are not part of the score. They are EA's end-of-game letter grades, produced by a formula nobody outside EA can inspect, and we would rather the score be reproducible from the stats you can see on the match report. Every point in a Star Score traces back to a counted event in its breakdown. ## The September 2026 recalibration The skater weights were first set by hand. In September 2026 we checked them against roughly 230,000 skater-games from tracked clubs, asking two questions of each stat: how much of a typical score did it account for, and how strongly did it relate to the player's team actually winning that game? Goals, assists, shots, plus/minus, faceoffs and the penalty terms all held up. Four things did not, and those are what changed: - **Giveaways were taxing the wrong players.** A skater's giveaway count had no relationship with whether their team won, but it tracked their possession time closely: the players who carry the puck are the players who turn it over. At 0.3 points each, giveaways were the third-largest term in the score and were quietly penalizing the puck carriers who drive offence. The deduction is now 0.1. - **Possession had no term at all.** Time with the puck is one of the strongest predictors of winning in the data, on par with shots on net, and the score ignored it. It now earns 0.25 points per minute, which for a typical skater pays about what shots do. - **Hits are a style, not a contribution.** Hit counts are remarkably consistent from game to game for a given club, which makes them a good description of how a team plays, and they have almost no relationship with winning. At 0.2 each they were worth about a point a game, a quarter of a goal. They are now 0.05. - **Takeaways were outpaying shots.** Takeaways are frequent in EASHL and only weakly related to winning; at 0.5 each they paid the average skater more per game than shots on net did. They are now 0.25. Interceptions, which carry a little more signal, stay at 0.5. The net effect on any one game is modest: the average skater's score moves by one to two points, and the top-scoring skater on a team changes in about one game in seven. What changes most is who gets credit for possession-heavy games. A winger who carried the puck for seven minutes and coughed it up eight times used to lose 2.4 points for the night; the same line now comes out nearly a point ahead. ## What the score does not do The score does not adjust for position. Goals and assists are roughly half of a typical skater's score and forwards get more of both, so forwards average higher Star Scores than defencemen, and a quiet shutdown game by a defenceman reads low. The counting stats defencemen accumulate more of, hits and blocks, are precisely the ones the data says do not move outcomes, so raising their weights would reward the wrong thing. Read the stars as "who had the largest measurable impact on this game", not as a position-adjusted rating. It also does not know about context EA does not record: shot quality, where on the ice a giveaway happened, or how much of a goalie's workload came from the slot rather than the boards. ## Reading the breakdown Every Star Score on ChelHead expands into its breakdown, one row per term above, so you can see exactly where a player's points came from. If a teammate's score is carried by possession and shots rather than goals, they are generating offence that did not finish. If a goalie's score is mostly volume saves with no save-percentage bonus, they faced a lot of rubber and let in their share. The breakdown is the same wherever the score appears, from the match report to a player's game log. --- ChelHead is an independent EASHL stats tracker. This web site is not endorsed by or affiliated with Electronic Arts Inc. Machine-readable index: https://chelhead.com/llms.txt · Sitemap: https://chelhead.com/sitemap.xml · Contact: support@chelhead.com