We at hockeyfreeforall.com have been enjoying our summer and hope you have been too.  We wanted to alert you that we will be posting a plethora of thought-provoking, fun, and possibly controversial articles in the coming weeks.

First we plan to construct our analysis for players participating in the world cup of hockey.  Once the rosters finalize, we will tabulate their advanced Bracton scores and see if we can have the same type of success we had predicting playoff outcomes for the past three years!  At first blush it appears Sweden is the odds on favorite, but we will provide details on why this may be the case in the coming weeks.

Second, we are contemplating an accumulation of winners and losers based on how we perceive off season moves for each team….who improved the most, who took steps back…..that type of thing.  Spoiler alert – BOS and ANA look to us like they might fall significantly…….Stay tuned.

Last, but by no means least, we will of course be publishing our predictions for the upcoming season by conference. Last year we had admittedly mixed but reasonably positive correlations to final order of finish with very few outliers (like Calgary, ugh).  This year we are going to attempt to fine tune the guesswork associated with the dearth of data for first year players.  We admit this type of prognostication is not limited by the data we have, but by the data we do not, and was the single biggest factor in our far lower prospective versus retrospective results.

To us, this is the single biggest opportunity in the game today; the collection and use of data that attest to the merits of building a team with mistake minimizers.Given our retrospective findings for the last three years, and there extremely high correlation to final order of conference finish, other conclusions are difficult to draw.

The puck drops approximately one month from today.