Depends on the team . In a perfect world you ' d have four scoring lines , but the NHL is a hard cap with tons of roster restrictions , so coming up with four scoring lines is basically impossible . Unless you ' re the 201516 Pittsburgh Penguins , your third line is not going to be scoring as much as your top line . So what you do is you try to find some guys who are really good defensively even if they don ' t have any scoring touch , and ideally they ' d be able to shutdown the other team ' s top line so that your top line doesn ' t have to and can focus on scoring . And then you still have teams that insist on rolling a fourth line full of enforcers . <| sep |> I know that works for pitch type so you can counteract the stoke checkerboard