NHL analysis

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.

Just to let everyone know, I’m still here and will be blogging again for the upcoming season.  I’ll be starting with a team by team analysis of additions and changes over the summer - what to watch for, what to expect, what I think about each team’s moves over the past month or so.

I’ve also been working on improving my Power Rankings’ formulas and more, which will hopefully improve my game predictions and more for the upcoming year.

See you soon!

Well, now that the regular season is over, so is the first season of my game predictions.  I ended up with 708 correct predictions on 1230 games, for a percentage of 57.6%.  Shootouts were my Achilles heel, for certain.  In April alone, my predictions were wrong for 7 of the 8 games that went into a shootout.

I met one of my goals for predictions, beating out both the home team winning percentage (53.3%) and the expected winners based on points (56.8%).  My other goal was to be over 60% for the year, which unfortunately I did not reach.

For next year I’m confident I can improve on my record.  The major change I’m already planning on implementing is including “recent” results into my power rankings and thus, into my game predictions.  That will bring hot and cold streaks into the mix and should help a great deal.  I’m also going to continue to include goals for and against, but throw out shots taken and allowed, after seeing how those stats punished certain teams.  Who cares if you give up 30 shots per game if your team GAA is top 10 in the league?

The final weekend of the regular season is upon us.  It’s been one hell of a ride.  I hope you’ve all enjoyed it as much as I have.

I’ll be blogging throughout the playoffs, starting with an in depth look at each first round matchup next week.  Stay tuned!

The Hockey Leaks Blog has been updated with a look at the remaining races in the NHL:

And so we get to the final playoff spot battle, which happens to be the battle that involves the most teams. The Islanders currently hold 7th, Carolina 8th, Rangers 9th, Leafs 10th, Habs 11th and Bruins 12th. Islanders seem to have 7th spot tied up, but their play has struggled in the last few games and for them to fall back to the rest would not be surprising. Carolina has a two point lead over Toronto and NYR for 8th spot, but the Leafs have a game in hand while NYR has two. Montreal seems to be out of it, as they sit three points back and have played two more than Toronto, three more than NYR and the same as Carolina. For them to make the playoffs it’s all up-hill. As for the Bruins they also have an up-hill climb, currently sitting six back but with two games in hand on the Hurricanes.

While you’re there also check out the numerous articles (on the homepage).  My thoughts on my most recent Power Rankings can also be found there.

Power Rankings are up for March 6, 2007.  Also, I have found a fixed a glitch in the Expected Final Standings, which was predicting points totals for a few teams (Nashville, Detroit, Chicago in particular) beyond what was even possible.

This page will keep you up to date daily with standings based on Winning Percentages and Power Rankings plus schedule difficulty, but there are several other sites that offer their own views on the race you may find interesting or useful.

James Mirtle updates his Playoff Push regularly by giving the record each team needs over its remaining games to finish the season with 95 points and by doing so all but guarantee a playoff spot. While 95 points is neither statistically a guarantee of a playoff berth nor the minimum actually required (last year Montreal and Tampa Bay slipped in with 93 and 92 points, respectively) it is true that 95 points is a pretty good target to shoot for.

The Hockey Rodent offers RealStandings, which is based on pure winning percentages. Unlike me, the Rodent does not differentiate between home and away games. He also includes in his listing total current wins, losses and ties.

The Hockey Rodent also offers a Playoff Berth-O-Meter, which gives a percentage chance of teams to make the playoffs based on each team’s possible range of points.  Since the Rodent focuses on the New York Rangers, the Berth-O-Meter is usually available for the Eastern Conference playoff race, though I’ve seen the Western Teams up from time to time.

Power Rankings have been updated for February 28, 2007.

The movement has definitely died down on the rankings, due to the fact that my rankings take into account the entire season without emphasizing recent games.  I’m going to be taking a long look at the rankings in the off-season and will likely change how I calculate the rankings for next year, probably giving the most recent 5 or 10 games more importance to better illustrate how a team performs as the season progresses.

I still think my Power Rankings are a pretty solid indicator team strength, but only if you keep in mind that I emphasize shots taken and allowed.  Teams can win when they’re regularly outshot and can lose when they outshoot their opponents.  As with any stats, take them with a grain of salt.