I was still wondering myself, so I emailed Yahoo customer care and asked them.

This was their reply:

Penalty minutes are considered a positive statistic in order to allow positive scoring contributions from a larger number of players. While a penalty does put a team at a temporary disadvantage, a moderate to high penalty minute (PIM) total is often the sign of a tough two-way player.

I also thought that Don Cardi may have been incorrect when he said a few weeks ago that in setting up the league he was not given the option of making PIM a negative statistic if he wished, so I asked Yahoo about that as well.

Their response to that - which made no sense to me whatsoever - was that in a private league using a "Points Only" scoring format the commissioner could assign PIM a negative value if he so desired, but in Roto or HTH scoring, even in a private league, the commissioner did not have that same option.


Anyway, I wrote back to them suggesting that in the future, regardless of which of the three scoring formats are used, the commissioner should have the option of configuring the league in any manner that he wished.