With the season about 1/5 -1/6 over, we have calculated the Spearman’s Rho for the Advanced Bracton score applied to conference rank for the games played so far this season within both conferences.  Happily, we are hitting it out of the park so far, with a RHO score in the east of 0.711 !!  Not bad for 16 teams, with WSH and NJ providing most of the negative impact.  If and when NJ hits a snag and reverts lower, our eastern conference RHO may get to over 0.80!!

In the west, after a pathetic start, the last ten days has brought our western conference number from the mid single digits all the way up to an almost respectable 0.323.  This number, while improved would look very similar to that we have found in the east save for the excellent start for WPG and the dismal performance of CGY.  In fact, if the two teams flipped places in the standings our western RHO would be 0.718.

We would be lying if we weren’t rooting for a downturn with WPG and a handsome turnaround in Calgary.  We will keep you updated on the progress but we are encouraged by the potentially predictive flavor of our metric so far in what is admittedly still a small sample size.