We have been painstakingly calculating our retrospective stats for both conferences.  Our eastern conference results are now available.   The Advanced Bracton Score, when tabulated against actual conference rank was 0.935 retrospectively predictive!!  This is only about 2% lower than our western conference score.

The next step in our sutdy is to perform rank calculations pitting the the Advanced Bracton score against Corsi, Fenwick, and (don’t laugh) goals for versus goals against differential.  Wait, you mean the Advanced Bracton score is a better indicator of success than if a team scores more goals on average than their opponent?  We were actually kidding about this, but we performed the analysis anyway.  As it turns out, the retrospective Advanced Bracton for 2017 was only 3 and 1% less accurate than goal differential for the east and west conferences respectively (0.96 for both).

So, at the risk of sounding obvious, the truism that scoring more goals than the other team is only slightly more representative of team success than is the philosophy of minimizing mistakes – at least for this season.

We cannot understate that managements and coaching staffs who value players who minimize mistakes win hockey games.  And, as NSH and OTT (two teams that did not score at the upper end of the AB this year) there is no time like the present to improve on playing excellent team, two-way hockey.  While we have not formulated the AB scores for these two in the playoffs, we are assuming they have been an improvement over their regular season totals.  We’ll bet you a steak dinner……..any takers?

We have enjoyed astounding accuracy in years past with respect to the outcomes of playoff series using the Advanced Bracton metric.  Even though this year has been a very noticeable exception (who would have thought that the teams that made the most mistakes in the regular season would have gotten this far?), it is our strong posture that teams which excel at maximizing the AB metric tend to fare better than those that don’t……wait till next year!

However, what is far less surprising, is that every team with a positive AB score made the playoffs in 2017.  If memory serves, there has only been one occasion in the past three seasons where this has not been the case (LA 2014-15).

Stay tuned for our next entries here – What Las Vegas can do to compete immediately as well as analysis of post season trades and player movements.