Who's hot, and how we know.
momentum. is an independent NHL analytics site. Every player gets a Heat score after every game, and every game night gets its story.
Hockey intelligence, daily.
Box scores tell you what happened. We try to tell you who is playing well right now — not on paper, not over a whole season, but over the last few games — and what that meant for last night and means for tonight.
Every morning the site updates with last night's results, a story for the night and for each game, the best goals with their clips, and fresh Heat for every skater in the league.
How Heat is calculated.
Heat is a player's points per minute of ice time over his last five games, put on a scale from 0 to 100. A player producing 0.12 points per minute — 7.2 points per 60 minutes on the ice — is at 100. Anything above stays at 100.
Ice time matters because the same point means more in less time: a winger with a goal and an assist in 12 minutes is hotter than one with the same line in 22. Five games is long enough to smooth out a lucky night and short enough to catch a streak while it is still happening.
- 85–100White-hot
- 70–84On fire
- 55–69Hot
- 40–54Warm
- 25–39Neutral
- 0–24Ice cold
Rankings only include skaters with at least three games in the window, so one big night after an injury doesn't top the board. Team Heat is the average of a team's five hottest skaters. Goalies aren't measured in points: they are ranked by save percentage over their recent starts.
Next to Heat we always show the comparison that gives it meaning — the player's own season pace, his position's league average, his last five games — because a number on its own says little.
Written by AI, from the numbers only.
The nightly recap and the story of each game are written by an AI model, from our own data: the final score, every goal in the NHL's score feed, the box score, the three stars, Heat and our pre-game pick. The model gets no rumours, no quotes and nothing we can't check.
Before a story is published, its claims are checked against the official score feed — who scored, when and how many. A draft that fails the check goes back to be rewritten.
A pick for every game, with its record in public.
Each game gets a pre-game pick from our model, built on Heat, goaltending, rest and home ice. Its full record — every pick, hit or miss — is public on the accuracy page. Hockey is hard to predict, and we would rather show the real number than a flattering one.
Where it comes from.
Stats come from the NHL's public stats API and update throughout the night. Goal clips play in NHL.com's own player, and game highlights are the NHL's own YouTube videos — we embed them, we don't host them.
momentum. is independent and not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by the National Hockey League or any of its teams. NHL and team names and logos are trademarks of the NHL and its teams.