A dynasty league with a real salary cap — you keep your roster, forever, and you live with every contract you sign. A $200 cap, 1–4 year deals out of an auction draft, 23-man rosters with a minors system, and 22 head-to-head matchups before the playoffs. You're the GM, the capologist, and the guy who has to answer for a healthy scratch.
In a dynasty league there's exactly one chance to get in on the ground floor — and this is it. Founding owners lock the last open questions: league size (10, 12, or 14), buy-in ($100, $200, or $250), the weekly prop rotation, and how the bag gets split. Once the league fills, those franchises are spoken for indefinitely.
Everybody pays the same buy-in and it all goes into one pot — then that pot splits into the Placement Bag for the teams that win games and the Prop Bag for the teams that win categories. Half the money rides on the Cup. The other half is live from week one, which means nobody's season is ever actually over.
Buy-in is a founding-owner call — $100, $200, and $250 are all on the table. Bigger buy-in, bigger weekly prop.
About a third of the pot never touches the standings. It goes out week after week to whoever wins that week's category — so a team sitting at 4-14 with the right kind of roster can still take money home every Sunday.
The weekly prop rotates from category to category — Most Goals one week, Most Saves the next, Most Hits after that. Win the category, take the cash. Roughly $20 on the line every week, all season long.
Build a bruiser. Hits count .2 and blocked shots count .4 in our scoring, so a roster stacked with fourth-line wreckers and shot-blocking defensemen is quietly live every single night — and on Most Hits or Most Blocks week, nobody touches them. You do not need stars to cash.
One or more season-long winners in categories that have nothing to do with your record. Rebuilding, punting, or just bad? There's still a check with your name on it in April.
Cap Efficiency is the one that stings. You can win the Cup on a $200 payroll and still watch a last-place team collect for squeezing more points out of every dollar than you did. And Best Rookies means the tank job has a paycheck attached.
Only a dynasty league can run these. Side-pots that live across seasons, funded a little at a time — and they don't have to pay out every year.
The back-to-back pot has never been won. It can't have been — this is year one. Somebody eventually walks off with a bag that's been building since the league started, and every season it survives makes it worse for everyone else.
Founding owners set the final prop slate, the weekly category rotation, and the bag split before the startup draft.
Dynasty rosters, a hard $200 salary cap, real contracts with real term, a minors system, and a waiver wire that costs you cap space. Here's exactly how a KFHL season works.
You keep your roster year over year — no redraft, no reset. The only new blood entering the league each season is the incoming rookie class. The team you build in year one is the team you answer for in year five, and the prospect you stash today wins you a Cup later.
Year one runs a Free Agent auction draft — real money, real contracts — followed by a Rookie Draft on fixed rookie deals with no bidding. Year two and beyond it's the rookie draft only, ordered off the prior season's standings. The 2026 drafts land before the NHL opener on Sept 29.
Every team gets a $200 salary cap. Auction bidding sets each player's salary (league minimum $1), and you choose the term at signing — 1 to 4 years. Pay up for a star on a four-year deal and you're still paying for him when he's 34. The cap is the whole game.
23 players, 20 in the daily lineup — 12 forwards, 6 D, 2 G — slotted at C, LW, RW, D and G. Five minors slots for rookies (under 82 NHL games) plus up to 3 on IR, and neither the minors nor IR counts against your roster limit or your cap.
Waivers run as a daily auction against your cap: minimum bid is the player's contract, and your winning bid becomes his salary (you can sign him for a single year). Clear waivers and he drops to free agency at league minimum. There's no cap on how often you can work the wire — the cap hit you eat on every drop does the policing for us.
Cut a guy and you retain 50% of his cap hit for the rest of the year. There is no free delete key here. Every reckless bid in the October auction is a decision you're still paying for at the March trade deadline.
22 head-to-head points matchups, then four weeks of playoffs across three rounds: Division, Conference, and a two-week Cup Final. Best regular-season record gets its buy-in back on the way through.
Trade players, prospects, contracts and future rookie picks. In a capped dynasty, a cheap long-term deal is an asset all by itself — and so is cap space in a year somebody's trying to win. Fleece someone in November and hear about it for years.
Franchises are yours indefinitely. If you ever step away, ownership reverts to the commissioner as fiduciary for $0, or you sell the team to a new owner at market value. Build something good enough and it's worth something.
Every category pays — which is exactly why a grinder roster is a real strategy in this league and not a punchline.
A goalie who stops 38 of 40 in a win banks 5 for the win, 8.74 in saves and gives back 3 — meaning the guy you started because he was facing a shooting gallery just outscored your first-line center.
Hits and blocked shots are live categories, not filler. A bruiser roster banks points every night your snipers are cold — and owns the weekly board whenever the prop rotates to Most Hits or Most Blocks.
Typical season lines by archetype, what they bank under KFHL scoring, and what that should cost you against the $200 cap. Use it as a guardrail, not gospel — the room sets the real price.
| Tier | Archetype | Expected Pts | Contract Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Elite C | 105 pts, 260 SOG, 950 FOW | 425+ | $33 – 41 |
| Elite W (sniper) | 95 pts, 50 G, 320 SOG | 400+ | $37 – 46 |
| Elite D | 85 pts, 120 BLK, 25:00 TOI | 360+ | $32 – 40 |
| Elite G | 33 W, .920, 5 SO | 350+ | $39 – 49 |
| Elite playmaker | 100 pts but 28 G / 72 A | 350+ | $18 – 22 |
| Two-way #1 D | 55 pts, 190 BLK, 24:00 TOI | 310+ | $23 – 28 |
| Second-tier F | 70 pts, 200 SOG | 300+ | $17 – 21 |
| Volume shooter | 60 pts, 310 SOG | 290+ | $15 – 19 |
| Starter G — workhorse | 55 GS, .905 | 275+ | $24 – 30 |
| Top-4 D | 45 pts, 170 BLK | 265+ | $14 – 17 |
| Starter G — true starter | 50 GS, .905 | 250+ | $19 – 24 |
| Starter G — timeshare | 45 GS, .905 | 205+ | $11 – 14 |
| Category specialist | 25 pts, 280 HIT | 200+ | $1 – 3 |
| #5 D / depth F | ~22 pts | 185+ | $1 – 3 |
Note the bottom of the board. A category specialist who hits 280 times banks 200+ points for a dollar or two — which is how you afford the elite center at the top without gutting the rest of your roster.
Not the watered-down big-network version. Fantrax is what serious dynasty leagues use — deep player pools down to the junior prospects, true keeper support, and scoring that goes all the way down to hits, blocks and faceoff wins, which is the only reason a bruiser roster is viable here.
It also runs the parts that make this league what it is: auction drafts with salaries and multi-year contracts, a hard $200 cap, daily waiver auctions, IR and minors slots that sit outside the cap, and future rookie-pick trading — so the commissioner isn't refereeing spreadsheets at midnight.
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