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I’m back again for round 2 of Preseason vs. Regular season! This time with 13 more seasons worth of data! The seasons we are taking into consideration starts from season 31 and goes all the way to the preseason of season 52 that just finished.

If you did not read my first article on this topic, I recommend you do that first to get some kind of familiarity with what is to come. Or if you simply are someone that likes data and arbitrary stats. I also wrote a follow up article to that first one relating to my predictions, which you can find here.

I will start of with going over the three questions I asked last time, their charts, and how the results change after I include the extra seasons. Then there will be a new fancy chart!

Disclaimer: Even though I now have more than twice the amount of seasons worth of data compared to last time, it is still not enough to be considered statistically significant. However, excluding teams’ regular season records and stats presented via award shows, this is all we have available to us when it comes to player and preseason specific data. Unless you know something I do not?

Average Placement Difference Between Preseason and Regular Season

These charts show how many spots a team drops or gains, on average, depending on how they did in the preseason. The left/first chart you see is from my last article(seasons 43-50). The right/second chart has the updated results(seasons 34-51).

Something that immediately stood out to me is that almost every position got a higher average difference after we added more data. Which makes sense, seeing as teams are not afraid to give their rookies top minutes and play around with the lines during the preseason. This of course makes the relation to the regular season results a lot more random when the teams start playing their best lines.

Can anything new be concluded from the updated chart?
Not really. Surprisingly enough the conclusion from my last article still stands firm: “Wherever a team ends up in the preseason they could expect to end up no more than three spots higher up or further down the standings when the regular season is done.”

Top-10 Goal Scorer From Preseason That Keep It Up in the Regular Season

These charts tell us how often a top-10 goal scorer from the preseason ended up as a top-10 goal scorer in the regular season. The left/first chart you see is from my last article(seasons 43-50). The right/second chart has the updated results(seasons 31-51).

What we concluded last time was that these numbers are completely random and basing any predictions on them are a terrible idea. I wanted to show the updated chart for those who are interested, but not much can be gathered from it.

Total Assists From the Top-10 Assist Leaders



The visualization on these charts aim to show us how many total assists were achieved by the top-10 assist leaders during the preseason compared to the regular season. The first chart you see is from my last article(seasons 43-50). The second chart has the updated results(seasons 31-51). The second chart is a little wonky because I had to glue multiple charts together since my chart provider does not allow more than ten seasons at a time.

For those of you that are curious why the assist totals are much lower in preseasons 32 to 36, this is because during those each team only played 24-30 games. You might also notice a difference between the season 43 numbers in both charts. That is because I messed up in my last article. 216 is actually the total goals for the season instead of assists. It has been corrected in the new chart.

Since season 37 we can see that more assists still happen during the preseason compared to the regular season. The preseason wins it 10 times out of 15.

Now To A New Type of Chart: How does the overtime and shootout games split look like?

This piece of pie chart is quite simple and shows us the total number of overtime and shootout games there have been in the preseason and regular season between seasons 37 to 51. I started counting at season 37 because that is when we came back to playing 50 games during the preseasons again.

It is really even which one could have predicted. But it is also interesting to see them this even since, as I mentioned earlier in the article, teams sometimes scramble their lines and allotted player minutes during the preseason. Personally I thought the regular season would have had a good amount more tied games when teams play their best. But that is why I do things like this: To have my assumptions destroyed.

Now we are out of charts. Time to look at the future yet again and hopefully do better than last season…
Season 52’s preseason is over. Let us look at the updated numbers and see if we can figure out the regular season’s top-5 teams!

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

My Regular Season Prediction
The upcoming regular season’s top-5:
1. Anchorage Armada
2. Anaheim Outlaws
3. Newfoundland Berserkers
4. St. Louis Scarecrows
5. Kelowna Knights

I’m not going to predict the top goal scorers this season as there is no reason to even guess until I find some more reliable data. So here is the assist prediction for this season instead.

Top-10 Preseason Assists
1.  Cal Labovitch (DET)
2.  Khabib Nurmagomedov (DET)
3.  Augustus Wang (ANC)
4.  Luciano Vessot (KEL)
5.  Henrik Lekberg Osterman (COL)
6.  Michael Fitted (CAR)
7.  Thomas Vanice (NLB)
8.  Rintarou Okabe (NLB)
9.  Alex Petrenko (ANA)
10. Luke McMaster (DET)

These ten players amounted for a total of 359 assists.

My Regular Season Prediction
I predict that we will see a total of 342 assists from the top-10 assist leaders.

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Now we are at the tidbits section of this article. First I want to correct/confirm some of the information from the last article, and then I want to share some more interesting facts I found after digging deeper.

High Scores
The most points by a team in a season is STILL the Vancouver Whalers. HOWEVER, they beat their own high score from the last article(71) because in season 42 they scored a total of 74 points.
The most goals scored in a season is NOT Jagger Fouquette(33) anymore but actually Alex Light who had 34 goals in season 32.
The most assists in a season is STILL Nickolas Klaus with 46 assists in season 45.

Fight for Number 1
The closest race for the number one seed is STILL season 45 with the top five teams being within 4 points of each other.

Top Notch Consistency
In the previous article I averaged out the final regular season placement of each team after the league expanded to ten teams(season 45), and we saw that the St. Louis Scarecrows had the best average at 4.33. With the addition of season 51 St. Louis is still number 1, but their average worsened ever so slightly after finishing 6th and they are now at 4.57.

And now that I had more seasons to look at I wanted to see which team had the best average in the 8 team era(after we changed it from two conferences to a single group), going from season 34 to 44. Yet again we see the St. Louis Scarecrows at the top of our list. Their average placement was an astonishing 2.82! Giving them a total placement average since season 34 of 3.35.

All teams seasonal and average placements can be found in the spreadsheet I will link at the end of this article.

The McDavid
Jagger Fouquette of the Detroit Falcons is STILL the only player to accomplish being number 1 in both most goals and assists in the same season. However, something of note is that the last three preseasons(50-52) we have had one player topping both the goal scorer and assist leaderboards. Which is quite crazy seeing that it had never happened before season 50(unless it did before season 31).
S50: Jagger Fouquette
S51: Alexei Rykov
S52: Cal Labovitch

Now onto some more, new fancy numbers and fun statistics!

Seasonal Hot Streak
There is a single regular season three-peat out there. From season 41 to season 43 we had the same team take the number 1 spot. The Vancouver Whalers are the owners of this impressive feat.

The Secret Sauce
The St. Louis Scarecrows are definitely taking each preseason very seriously. Starting from season 35, St. Louis have topped the preseason standings 11 times. That is out of a total of 18 preseasons. Maybe this is the secret to their better-than-the-rest average placements?

Change Is Always A Good Thing
A team that rebrands and/or relocates always have a better season following the rebranding compared to the last season they played with the old brand.

The Colorado Mammoths finished in 6th in season 40 and after that rebranded into the Colorado Raptors. This apparently sparked the fire in their players as in season 41 the team came in 3rd.

The Prince George Firebirds came in 7th in season 41. Clearly inspired by Colorado they then relocated to Anchorage and became the Anchorage Armada. And just like Colorado, the team did better and ended season 42 in 4th.

Last on our list is the Montreal Militia. In season 49 they came in 6th, and before season 50 they moved to Carolina and became the Carolina Kraken. This gained them a few spots in the standings when they finished season 50 in 3rd place.

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And that wraps up this seasons’ “Preseason vs. Regular Season” article. There are a lot more data points in these indexes than what I have used here. I will likely be coming back to them at some point to dig up more interesting numbers. I’m also planning on writing an updated article after the S53 preseason closes to see what will have changed by then. How exactly that will turn out depends on what data FHM has easily available. I do want to get some new data charts in here at least, as this season’s article had much of the same as the last one.

Link to my spreadsheet.

Thanks for reading!