Hockey has come to a close and I know I’m a bit slow acknowledging that fact. Perhaps it’s because there are no sports worth watching on television at the moment. I guess CFL football is starting soon, but I really only watch it because it’s an excuse to get drunk - it’s not like it is incredibly entertaining or anything. Perhaps if the Eskimos crush the Riders every night like they did last night it will be entertaining. Especially considering I live in the heartland of Rider pride.

Regardless I was extremely successful in my playoff fantasy pool and finally pulled out a victory for the first time in a long time. I finished with 154 points led mostly by Evgeni Malkin which put me 19 points clear of second, 50 points clear of third and a whopping 104 points clear of last place. It was a drubbing, and if Chad hadn’t have selected the same teams as me it would have been even worse. Amazingly my statistical analysis of the playoffs seemed to work - I definitely had a leg up on the field. I’ll admit that teams have to continue to play as you expect them to for my analysis to be accurate, but it worked out this year that’s for sure.

So in keeping with that theme I thought I’d apply what I developed for the playoffs to predicting the standings in the upcoming NHL season. Below are my initial rankings utilizing last years rosters as they ended as well as making some projections for players that had off years or suffered injuries (or players like Jose Theodore or J.S. Giguere that may not end up the starter). I had to do some adjusting to normalize the numbers and I will admit that the win percentages yield slightly less wins than required (every game needs a winner), but this is mostly due to rounding and the bottom feeder teams. Plus I added a few points to each total for overtime losses. I will work on fixing that in subsequent analysis. I will update this again once the draft and free agent signings take place, as well as again just prior to the season starting so that I can get the most up to date roster possible. From there I plan on using the game results after about 25 games to adjust my predictions and potentially indicate teams that are lower or higher in the standings than they should be.

So what point is there for this? Well I’m not sure, I’m mostly doing this as an experiment to see how close I can get to the actual finish. Obviously this being my first attempt I anticipate some issues and I know that my projections for injured players could use a bit of work. I did see some research on predicting player totals following an injury, but haven’t dove into understanding that yet. I think from a fantasy perspective it could be useful in predicting which goalies might be valuable as getting wins always seems to be a bit of a crapshoot. Anyway take it for what it’s worth and we’ll see how accurate I can be.

Revision 2 of this article is available here

Revision 1 of this article is available here