The Line Blender: Hypothetical Russian Olympic Lineups
2026-02-09
Unlike the lineups produced in my last post on Olympic lineups with announced rosters, which will eventually have a point of comparison, these hypothetical Russian lines will remain hypothetical. Using MoneyPuck data from both the 2024 and 2025 seasons, I've applied the same optimization methods (linear programming and greedy) to available Russian NHL players1.
All posts in this series:
1. The Line Blender: Optimizing Lineups Using MoneyPuck's Expected Goals Percentage (xG%)
2. The Line Blender: Embedding Line Performance Using a GNN
3. The Line Blender: Using a GNN To Produce Olympic Rosters
4. The Line Blender: Using GNN Embeddings for Player Rankings
5. The Line Blender: Olympic Lineups with Announced Rosters
6. The Line Blender: Hypothetical Russian Olympic Lineups