With the season about a quarter 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.  In the eastern conference we are tracking at 0.59, which is not bad for 16 teams. TB and NJ are providing most of the negative impact.  If and when NJ hits a snag and reverts lower, and TB starts playing to their potential our eastern conference RHO would be 0.71 if these two outliers are eventually flipped.

In the west, the last ten days has brought is now tracking a 0.47, up handsomely from 0.323 reported last time.  This number, while improved would look very similar to that we have found in the east save for the dismal performance of CGY.  If CGY were in even 9th place, and ARZ was 13th as roughly predicted, our western conference rho would be +0.68.

We would be lying if we weren’t rooting for a large turnaround in Calgary, they are our only real outlier.  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.