***Have I fallen behind on refreshing the rankings? Don’t hesitate to email me at grant dot salzano at gmail if you’d like the rankings updated!***
NCAA Percentage Index (NPI) Rankings:
Division I Men’s Hockey
Welcome to the 2025-2026 NCAA Men’s Hockey NPI Calculator! Using this tool, you can play around with the results of this year’s men’s college hockey season and see its effect on the NPI (NCAA Percentage Index).
Big news this year as the NCAA has decided to get rid of the Pairwise Rankings in favor
of switching to solely to NPI. The women were already using NPI as part of the Pairwise calculations last season, but the common opponent and head-to-head factors are no more and both sports will now use NPI as its only metric for tournament selection.
This is our first season hosting either a Pairwise or NPI ranking for men’s hockey here at BC Interruption. We’ve been doing it for years for women’s hockey, but with so many other sources for the men’s rankings out there it didn’t seem worth the effort to go through the work to build it. With the two rankings now aligned a bit closer in their formulas, we did some tweaking to make it easier to add/remove teams and added in home/road weighting adjustments so it wouldn’t be too difficult to just pull in the men’s results and host both sports.
It also doesn’t hurt that BCI seems to be, at least as of publication, the only place you can find the NPI for now. Go us.
New this season:
- The easiest change to note is that overtime games are moving from a 0.67/0.33 win-loss split to 0.60/0.40. This is a men’s-only change.
- The biggest task we had in converting the women’s NPI to the men’s is that home/road weights had to be factored in. Home wins and road losses count as 0.8 games, and home losses and road wins count as 1.2 games. This was, honestly, pretty complicated to program and its calculation feels somewhat nonsensical to some folks. For example, an overtime home win means you have both a home win portion and a home loss portion, with the home win portion weighted x 0.8 and the home loss portion weighted x 1.2. That means that an overtime home win counts as 0.6 x 0.8 = 0.48 wins and 0.4 x 1.2 = 0.48 losses. You can imagine the silly implications this has on removing bad wins, too. In any case, we’re pretty confident we have the home/road calculations right, but with such a huge change it’s definitely possible we need to make a correction at some point we’ll take care of those as we find them. As CHN and USCHO and other sites get their own NPI rankings up, we’ll be able to compare ours to theirs to make sure we’re correct.
- The other important functional change to how the NPI (and formerly RPI) is calculated now has to do with removing “bad wins.” Previously, any win that lowered a team’s NPI would be removed from the calculation as a bad win. In practice this would mean that a really, really good team would only have a few games included in their calculation — and in fact, a team with a perfect record would only have one game (their best win) factoring into their NPI. Now, however, the NCAA implemented a change that says at least 12 wins must be included in the calculation, even if they lower your NPI. Any bad wins after those 12 can then be removed.
Should you wish to do some “what if” exercises and see what the rankings would be with a different game result, here are some simple instructions:
- To edit game results, go into the “Results” tab. You’ll see a line for every game of the season. You can edit the score for any past game(s), or enter a score for any future game(s). You do not need to add in the little extras like records or poll rankings that show for other rows — as long as the team names are typed in correctly, the results will pull in.
- Once you’ve changed your results in “Results,” pull up the “NPI” tab to see the resulting rankings.
And that’s it!
A few important notes and tips:
- It’s always possible that our calculator has an error somewhere. We’ll do our best to look for and fix any potential bugs as the year goes on. If you spot any, please reach out!
- Overtime wins count as a partial victory in the NPI calculation at 60% of a win. Ties, as always, count as 50% of a win, as do shootout wins in games where they occur.
- Score margin in games does not affect the rankings — only win/lose/tie. Whether a winner is decided in regulation or overtime, however, does matter.
- To remove results, you need to double click on the cells with scores in them and delete everything in the cell for both team’s scores. The sheet reads non-blanks as a score: for example, two blanks is “no game,” but two [space]’s will be read as a 0-0 tie. If it makes it easier, you can change the game type to “EX” and it’ll be treated as an exhibition game and removed.
- To add a game, just add a line in the “Results” tab like the rest of the lines. Just make sure you spell each team name exactly the same as the rest.
- Actual game results do not update automatically. I will be periodically updating throughout the week, hopefully with only a day or two, or less, of delay. The spreadsheet will then update with the new results if you refresh the page. You can see which dates’ games have been included at the top of the calculator. If you are impatient, you can always type in the missing results manually in the “Results” tab.
- Once you change results in the “Results” tab and switch over to the “NPI” tab, give it a second. The results will update, but maybe not instantaneously. It’s a pretty big spreadsheet.
If you have any questions, comments, or bugs to report, I can be reached at grant dot salzano at gmail dot com.
Enjoy!
