Power Rankings Return (soon)
After plenty of tweaking (and some wholesale changes), my weekly Power Rankings are good to go.
I started looking at Power Rankings a few years ago as a way to measure the relative “strength” of teams. Points is a very poor standard because at any given time some teams have played more games than others. Winning percentage is better but doesn’t take into account the difficulty of each teams’ schedule. And so, last year I developed a formula that took into account winning percentage and the average winning percentage of each team’s opponents (weighted for games played). But I still wasn’t happy.
This year I have made two major changes to my Power Rankings. First, I’ve incorporated recent success and schedule difficulty, hoping to show how hot or cold streaks can dramatically influence how strong a team is. So now the most recent games a team plays count for more than the teams played at the beginning of the year.
The second change was unplanned until a few days ago. I realized that giving teams extra credit merely for playing strong teams - regardless of how many points they managed to pick up in those games - was just as bad as ignoring schedule difficulty. The answer? I now include in my calculations an adjusted winning percentage which is calculated based on how well a team does against each team. So beating strong team counts for more than beating a weak team. Toronto receives more than one “point” for their overtime loss against Ottawa opening night. However, they receive no credit for losing to Ottawa the next day.
Anyways, I hope these changes result in a more accurate ranking of just how good the NHL teams are. I have some final tweaking to finish off, but will begin posting power rankings and game predictions sometime in the next week.