It’s that time of year again, the annual rite of passage in the NHL preseason, in which various publications rank the Top 50 or Top 100 players in the league – typically based entirely on subjective opinion.

Those rankings are always fun. They spark debate and intrigue. They also leave a lot of questions.

How exactly does one choose between Cale Makar and Nathan MacKinnon? They play two different positions, and they couldn’t be more different players. It’s an apples to oranges comparison to ask, “Who is better?” They’re both equally sublime. But we enjoy it because these are the same debates that have raged on in hockey-mad tap rooms for decades.

But rather than throw every player, different roles and all, into one pot and try to rank them, we’re going to take a different approach. 

We are unveiling Daily Faceoff’s first-ever “Archetype Rankings,” as a way to classify players into different categories. An archetype is a concept of form, an attempt to define the fundamental characteristics of something.

That can be difficult to do for hockey players. Most do not fit neatly into one box. But that is what we will attempt with the help of five front office executives from around the NHL, who provided opinion and feedback. We have also enlisted the help of Stathletes as a third-party data supplier to help with context and analysis to what our collective eyes may be missing.

In fact, NHL front offices have been working on similar archetypes projects for the last months and years. Archetype classification and rankings are known to be a big part of the team building process for Julien BriseBois and his two-time Stanley Cup champion Tampa Bay Lightning. The best ones have properly categorized players because it helps in four important ways for team building: 

1) It aids management in mapping out how previously successful teams and Stanley Cup winners have built their teams by archetype.