What Is FOW in Hockey? Faceoffs Won and Faceoff Percentage (FO%)

The NHL has counted faceoffs for every player since 1997-98. The league's glossary dates FOW, FOL and FO% to that season, with even-strength, power-play and shorthanded splits from the start and zone splits a dozen seasons later. The numbers come from the league's real-time scorers, the off-ice crew that Rule 36 of the rulebook puts at every game (three stats-entry scorers, a time-on-ice scorer and an event analyst, overseen by a scoring system manager) to "electronically record all official statistics."

The draw itself is Rule 76. A linesperson drops the puck between two players, and the rule spells out who puts his stick down first, the defending player at the eight spots outside center ice and the visitor at center. It doesn't say who wins the draw. The working standard, the one Sportlogiq's Sloan paper states outright, is that whichever team gets the puck first after the drop wins it, and the two players who took the draw are credited with the win and the loss. Wingers take some draws, including when an official sends a center out of the circle for a violation (a team's second violation on the same draw is a bench minor). Players listed as centers took 86% of the league's draws last season.

The analytics on faceoffs mostly try to put a price on a win. Michael Schuckers, Tom Pasquali and Jim Curro at St. Lawrence University ran 211,372 faceoffs from the three seasons ending in 2010-11 and found it took 76.5 wins to add one goal of differential. Sportlogiq's Nick Czuzoj-Shulman and four co-authors cited the same figure seven years later, then used the company's computer-vision tracking data to argue that what kind of win a center gets matters more than how many he gets.

It's a single division. Count the draws a player or team won, divide by the draws it took, and that's FO%. The league held 73,496 faceoffs in 2025-26, a little over 56 a game, and the play-by-play credits each one to a winner and a loser. These are the inputs:

• Faceoffs won (FOW), credited to the player who took the draw for the team that gained possession
• Faceoffs lost (FOL), charged to the other player in the circle
• Where the draw happened (offensive, defensive or neutral zone)
• The strength state (even strength, power play, shorthanded)

Here's a worked example with invented round numbers. A center takes 1,000 draws and wins 550, so he's at 55%, with 100 more wins than losses. At Schuckers' rate those extra wins are worth about 1.3 goals over a season. Drop him to 50% and they're worth nothing.

The NHL spells it face-off win percentage, and its stats site splits every player's draws by zone and strength. Those splits matter because draws aren't equal. A win in either end zone is worth far more than one at center ice, and a special-teams win is worth more than one at even strength. That's why the uses below lean on the splits.

FO% measures one skill in isolation, how often a player wins the draw in front of him, and the raw number holds up. Schuckers' group built a model that adjusted every player's results for zone, strength and home ice, then found it correlated with plain FO% at better than 0.95. Their conclusion was that raw FO% doesn't need adjusting, which is more than you can say for the hits and giveaways the same scorers log.

The team scale is narrow. Every draw has a winner and a loser, so the league sits at exactly 50%, and last season the teams ran from Buffalo's 45.9% to the Rangers' 54.5% (Ottawa finished a hair behind and took more draws). Detroit won 51.0%, 10th in the league, with 93 more wins than losses. The man advantage tilts it a bit; teams on the power play won 54.4% of those draws.

Individual centers spread out more, since a team's number blends several of them together. Among the 120 skaters who took at least 500 draws, the median won 51.1%, and only five got to 60%, led by Claude Giroux at 63.1%. Dylan Larkin took the third-most draws in the league, 1,492, and won 52.9%, a little better than the median. Andrew Copp was Detroit's best regular at 54.2%.

What does a good FO% buy you? Less than the attention it gets. Apply Schuckers' rate to last season and Ottawa's league-best differential was worth about 5.4 goals, Buffalo's cost about 5.0, and Detroit's bought about 1.2. Across the league, team FO% and goal differential correlated at 0.10, which is close to nothing.

Deploying centers by zone

Zone splits show which center a coach trusts with the draws that matter, and Detroit's are telling. Larkin won 50.3% of his defensive-zone draws and 54.5% in the offensive zone. J.T. Compher took 448 draws in his own end, far more than at the other end, a defensive role, and won 47.3% of them. Copp won 53.4% of his defensive-zone draws, the best of the three. In Schuckers' numbers it takes about 60 end-zone wins to make a goal and about 164 neutral-zone wins, so the end-zone draws are the ones to win.

Weighting special teams

Power-play and shorthanded draws are worth about two and a half times as much as even-strength ones in Schuckers' numbers (40.9 wins per goal against 101.6). His group concluded that a team's best faceoff men should take more of their draws outside the neutral zone and on special teams. Larkin took 264 power-play draws for Detroit and won 59.5%, more than six points better than his overall mark.

Pricing a specialist

Faceoff value scales with volume, which caps what a specialist can add. Schuckers' group put a center who takes 1,200 draws and wins 60% at about 3.1 goals of differential a season, roughly one point in the standings. That's real, and it's close to the ceiling. Only 23 skaters took that many draws last season and only five won 60% (of 500 or more), so you'd want a specialist to do something else well too.

A win isn't always clean

Sportlogiq found only 44.5% of the wins in the company's sample were clean, the puck sent straight to a teammate. Clean offensive-zone wins led to a shot event 38.6% of the time against 30.3% for the scrambles, and FO% counts both the same.

Teammates win draws too

Because the win goes to whichever team gets possession first, a winger who beats his man to a loose puck earns his center the win. The credit is individual, and the result is partly a team play that the center didn't finish himself.

Scorers make mistakes

An NHL team analyst who checked video against the league's real-time reports told Schuckers' group that about 5% of faceoffs were recorded wrong, with the Islanders' old building at Nassau Coliseum singled out.

It barely tracks with winning

In Sportlogiq's sample, faceoff win percentage's correlation with goals was minus-1.8% and its correlation with wins was 0.03%. You can win the draws and lose the game.

Does the home team have an edge on faceoffs?

A small one. Rule 76 makes the visiting player put his stick down first at center ice, and Schuckers' group found that playing at home raised a player's chance of winning a draw by 1.5%. Last season the home team won 50.4% of them.