The Puck Stops Here

At the beginning of the season, Jes Golbez tabulated the predictions from several sources in the blogosphere and in the mainstream media. He has predictions for the regular season standings from himself and Greg (who also writes on his blog), myself ( East Conference and West Conference), James Mirtle, Sisu Hockey and mainstream media in The Hockey News, McKeens, The Score Forecaster and John Buccigross of ESPN. It is time to look at the predictions.



In this figure (click on it to make it bigger), the teams are listed in their order of finish with the number of positions each individual prediction missed that prediction. As we can see the person who made the best prediction was a tie between me and John Buiccigross of ESPN. In general, the best results came from independent bloggers and not the mainstream media (which gives us a bit of a licence to bash them). The exceptions are John Buccigross who tied for the best set of predictions and James Mirtle who started out as a blogger but has been moving into the mainstream media with his job at the Globe and Mail who finished with the second worst record (only McKeen's was worse).

Lots of other gems can be mined from this data, for example, Chicago was the team that people had the easiest time predicting (we all knew they would be bad) and Philadelphia was the hardest (we didn't think they would be bad).

These predictions are all for fun and despite my regular season success, I do not claim my playoff predictions will work out nearly as well.