The longest off-season in sports ends tonight.  The 2018-19 season is upon us. What follows is a table outlining our predictions for the upcoming season.

Before getting to our model, we would like to alert you to our attempts at fine-tuning our statistics.  While much of our prognostication still amounts to guesswork (especially for players for whom we have no/little data), we think we have become at least slightly better at understanding what a replacement player would contribute versus someone who scores poorly on our mistake minimization scale, also known as the Advanced Bracton Score.  Addition by subtraction can be a powerful thing; so much so that….and here comes the shocker…….teams like OTT, BUF, MTL FLA, NYI and NYR, VAN and EDM have actually improved over their results of last year, in some cases vastly.

Obviously general managers of failing teams would at least attempt to stabilize their ships.  While complete rebuilds take many seasons, assembling a competitive (but still losing team) can be accomplished rather quickly.  We have found this to be especially true if there are obvious eyesores in the mistake department……getting rid of guys who are in the bottom third of our scale is always a great place to start since they can ALWAYS be replaced (often times for less money).  Speaking of which, the removal of one or two players who score at the bottom of our scales seems to be a popular theme these days.  Even if GM’s across the league are not reading our site daily, they have received the memo; doing bad things is not as good as doing good things.  Duh.

Digressions aside, the following are our predictions for the year!!

We will be providing much more analysis of what we think will happen this season in forthcoming articles.  Stay tuned particularly in the next few days.