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*kenvald* · 12-29-2019, 08:37 PM

666 words

As the regular season has come to an end and we all witness the nailbiter that is the playoffs, I thought it would be a good time to be back with a quick follow up on my previous article(Pre-Season vs. Regular Season) and see how my predictions fared.

My first prediction was about the final standings. I tried to figure out, with the help of previous seasons’ data, how the top-5 would look like. My prediction looked like this:
1. Carolina Kraken
2. Colorado Raptors
3. Lethbridge Lions
4. Kelowna Knights
5. Anaheim Outlaws

And here are the final standings for the season:

A green team name means I predicted the right team in the right place.
Yellow/Gold means I correctly predicted the team ending up in the top-5, but I predicted the wrong place.
Red means the team I picked did not end up in the top-5.

1. Carolina Kraken
2. Anchorage Armada
3. Halifax Raiders
4. Lethbridge Lions
5. Kelowna Knights
6. St. Louis Scarecrows
7. Colorado Raptors
8. Anaheim Outlaws
9. Detroit Falcons
10. Vancouver Whalers

So as we can see, I did not do that great and ended with a 1-2-2 record. I do however want to thank Carolina for not making me look like a complete fool.

But if you do remember, there was a more generic kind of statistic that we could see from my last post where it was stated that all teams should expect to not gain or lose more than 3 places in the regular season standings compared to the pre-season. And this season was no different except for the Halifax Raiders that finished their pre-season in 9th but surprised the league by in the end taking the 3rd seed.

My second prediction was connected to the top-10 goal scorers of the season. I tried to figure out which players that were in the top-10 of goal scorers in the pre-season would also end the regular season as a top-10 scorer. These players were the ones I believed would be top-10 scorers:

Alexei Rykov (CAR)
Ravyn Tedisko (HFX)
Raquel Castillo Gutierrez (ANA/VAN)
Gylfi Eriksson (KEL)
Andrey Barbashev II (KEL)

Now let us see the regular season’s top-10:

A green player name means I correctly predicted the player being in the top-10.
Red means the player was in the top-10 during pre-season, and I predicted they would not be a top-10 in the regular season.

1. Khabib Nurmagomedov (DET)
2. Bobby Lane (CAR)
3. James Ronlain (STL)
4. Daniel Bischoff (ANC)
5. Karl Krashwagen (HFX)
6. Ravyn Tedisko (HFX)
7. Kevin Robinson (ANA)
8. Francois Breton (VAN)
9. Al Kayhall (HFX)
10. Jay Reeves (ANC)

As we can all clearly see, I’m absolutely terrible at this. But in my defense, I did state that the data behind who is gonna be a top-10 scorer or not had little to no correlation to what actually happens in the end. Well, let us pretend that did not happen and move on to the last prediction.

My third prediction was about the total number of assists by the top-10 assist leaders. We saw a total of 347 assists in the pre-season and the data pointed to there being a slightly lower total in the regular season. So I predicted we would see a total of 327 assists from the top-10 assist leaders. Did the data tell the truth? Was I even close?

Yes-ish, and not really. We did see less assists in the regular season but there was a very, very minor difference. We recorded 344 assists, only 3 fewer than in the pre-season. Which makes me only 17 assists off my mark. Which I will take as a win seeing how my second prediction went…

There we have it. Today we have learned to not ask me for advice when betting on the future.

But that does not mean I’m finished! You can look forward to a future article as I was earlier informed that we can still see indexes as far back as season 31. I can promise you more statistical significance and possibly even worse predictions than ever before!