We wanted to bring you up to date on our progress through roughly 30 NHL games.  For those that follow us, our rank scores of conference standings have been improving, especially in the west.

Our predictive rank score now stands at 0.74 (which we view as extremely high) in the western conference.  This means we have very few outliers relative to our preseason rankings of Advanced Bracton Scores.  DAL is contributing the most variance to date, and we believe they will perform closer to our estimate as the season progresses.  EDM and WPG coming back to the pack has certainly helped our ranking as well.

In the east we have also seen improvement, with the AB Rho standing now at 0.29.  While this score is admittedly somewhat lackluster, it is trending in the right direction.  Having PHI win their last 10 games certainly helps.  What is astounding is that we have two outliers (CBJ and NYI) that we pegged wrong so far.  Swapping their performance would have the eastern conference Rho at a very respectable 0.66!  That’s 37 points due to two teams.  A CBJ losing streak (8-1-1, in their last 10) coupled with an Islander winning streak (both of which are way over due), and our Rho is going to bound higher. Additionally, if BUF and OTT move higher and lower relative to one another, respectively, we will be nearly perfectly predictive.

In other words, the Advanced Bracton metric has been spot on in all but two majorly outlying cases, and four significant instances  through 30 games.  While our historical data has demonstrated a very high correlation with winning hockey games as analyzed retrospectively, (and winning playoff series with astounding accuracy), our abilities to project player and team performance has been limited.  This year, however, we implemented changes to our methodology regarding projections for players with little or no NHL experience, and as a result, may have sufficiently fine tuned the outcomes.

We will keep you posted and updated around the 40 game mark.