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***Citizen of Adraa*** · 12-13-2020, 07:22 AM

So hey. We are at the second Sunday of this season, and I figured, since we are about third of the way through, I could revisit my preseason article about predicting the season by TPE, and see how the predictions align with the results so far. Obviously, as I said, TPE is not be all end all of team performance and a lot of stuff can and will interfere or boost it, on top of some of the differences maybe not being nearly as influential as I made them to be. Anyway, let’s see how the teams were supposed to be lining up just about now according to my article.

1. Nevada Battleborn

2. Quebec Citadelles

3. Anaheim Outlaws Outlaws

4. Anchorage Armada Armada

5. Kelowna Knights Knights

6. Vancouver Whalers Whalers

7. Maine Timber Timber

8. Carolina Kraken Kraken

9. St. Louis Scarecrows

10. Colorado Raptors Raptors

11. Newfoundland Berserkers

12. Detroit Falcons Falcons

Just so we are up to speed, this was a combination of a few factors, not just the TPE, but at least a bit of how the TPE is spread around the team. Let’s see how that compares to the league right now, alongside how big of a change teams had compared to the spots I expected them to be at now (I am using FHM’s standings here).

1. Quebec Citadelles

(+1) – 18-2-2, 38 PTS, 92 GF, 57 GA
2. Anchorage Armada Armada

(+2) – 14-4-2, 30 PTS, 67 GF, 38 GA
3. Maine Timber Timber

(+4) – 15-6-0, 30 PTS, 70 GF, 55 GA
4. Kelowna Knights Knights

(+1) – 13-6-4, 30 PTS, 65 GF, 54 GA
5. Colorado Raptors Raptors

(+5) – 14-5-1, 30 PTS, 71 GF, 47 GA
6. Anaheim Outlaws Outlaws

(-3) – 13-12-0, 26 PTS, 64 GF, 64 GA
7. Newfoundland Berserkers

(+4) – 9-11-2, 20 PTS, 63 GF, 70 GA
8. Carolina Kraken Kraken

(same) – 9-11-1, 19 PTS, 56 GF, 72 GA
9. Detroit Falcons Falcons

(+3) – 8-9-3, 19 PTS, 65 GF, 66 GA
10. Nevada Battleborn

(-9) – 7-15-3, 17 PTS, 62 GF, 84 GA
11. Vancouver Whalers Whalers

(-5) – 7-15-2, 16 PTS, 49 GF, 93 GA
12. St. Louis Scarecrows

(-3) – 5-13-3, 13 PTS, 47 GF, 71 GA

If we sum up all of the position changes, teams changed their spots from the predicted to actual by 40 positions, or 3,33 positions per team. That...is a lot. And clearly, I haven’t done the greatest job of predicting, but honestly, that’s sort of the beauty of Js sometimes, the fact that it can be so unpredictable. Let’s see who are the biggest outliers though.

Let’s first talk a bit more general about the standings. Obviously, the lead that Quebec has got right now is pretty crazy and it’s honestly starting to be hard to imagine that they will falter enough to lose it considering they have 8 points in hand over anyone else in the league, even if Anchorage has 2 games in hand on them and Maine has 1. For what it’s worth, Quebec doesn’t seem to rely too much on their defense to choke away the other teams, but on their offense to outscore anything and anyone that dares to challenge them. It’s a playstyle we don’t often see from top teams, since they tend to play more akin to Anchorage – complete on ice domination, no scoring for you, all the scoring for us.

Speaking of Anchorage, they are a part of the group of teams chasing Quebec, that has some fairly interesting members. If you told me that the tie for 2nd about 20 games in would involve them and Kelowna, I wouldn’t find that weird a bit, but why is Maine here and why is Colorado just point behind is a different conversation entirely. This is a mix of two teams (Anchorage and Colorado) that have above average defenses and on top score very well, while Maine and Kelowna seems to win their games in a more narrow manner, being roughly on par by goals for but having about 10-15 more goals against. That would sort of point towards Anchorage and Colorado probably being the teams that in long term end up outshining Maine and Kelowna and get above them, but for now we are in a situation where both of these teams are about on par and extremely competetive with each other.

The next tier is the Anaheim tier, occupied solely by them. At 0 GD, the most games played in the league right now, 4 points behind the chasing pack but 6 ahead of the rest, Anaheim doesn’t currently have many teams to directly compete with for position, and right now they are basically hoping for someone from the 2-5 spots to cool down and drop down to them to get some proper fighting going on.
Spots 7-11 are the “not quite there“ teams. All of these are close enough where I would say the differences between what’s not working quite right aren’t making that much of a difference. These are occupied by Newfoundland, Carolina, Detroit, Nevada and Vancouver. What creates a bit of a separation here is that Nevada and Vancouver have both a bunch more games than the rest, and Vancouver’s GD is by far the worst in the league right now thanks to some fitness shenanigans and them getting blown out of the water on several occasions now, so they feel like the odd ones out for the last two seeds for the home advantage in the first round.

The last spot, and the last group, is still STL. Despite the fact that it’s somewhat likely that STL catches up the previous group pretty soon, or Nevada and Vancouver fall to them, whatever happens sooner, STL had one of the roughest starts to the season, and only now started showing up a bit in games, counting a win against QCC, which shows a bunch of promise and hopefully it’s showing that STL found some synergy and chemistry to catch up to the rest of the league.

So, what are the biggest outliers? I would say that the positive ones are definitely Maine and Colorado. Colorado is definitely playing to their strengths – they already had one of the best defensive cores in the league, and they managed to squeeze enough out of their offense to get them to a pretty good form right now, so they are looking pretty scary. Maine was a more overall decent team that had a weak goaltending duo, but that doesn’t seem to bother them too much right now.

For the negative ones, you have to look towards teams like Nevada and Vancouver. Vancouver could be explained by the fitness issues and a bad schedule, but their offense has been weak at best and their defense has been ridiculously leaky, and Nevada is performing so far out of expectations that I don’t exactly know what can be wrong. Looking at their numbers, you might suggest Nevada is actually slightly overperforming them, so I would expect that there is some healthy share of thinking about how the lines are doing right now in the coaching department of the Battleborn, and hopefully they can spin this season around.

Just at the very end, let’s try to predict how the season ends up shaping up considering the information we have. I can revisit this prediction at a later date, but I figured that since I am revisiting an article, I want to add at least some value instead of just rehashing information that was already available.

1. Quebec Citadelles

– playoff seed #1
2. Anchorage Armada Armada

– playoff seed #2
3. Colorado Raptors Raptors

– playoff seed #3
4. Maine Timber Timber

– playoff seed #5
5. Kelowna Knights Knights

– playoff seed #6
6. Anaheim Outlaws Outlaws

– playoff seed #7
7. Detroit Falcons Falcons

– playoff seed #4
8. Newfoundland Berserkers

– playoff seed #8
9. Carolina Kraken Kraken

– playoff seed #9
10. St. Louis Scarecrows

- playoff seed #10
11. Nevada Battleborn

- playoff seed #11
12. Vancouver Whalers Whalers

- playoff seed #12

This expects that the teams won’t do many drastic changes and continue on the trajectories they have set up right now, so this might be wrong as soon as the Monday sim. I expect Detroit to be able to beat out NL and Carolina narrowly thanks to their slightly better defense, St. Louis to keep improving faster than Nevada and Vancouver will, Anchorage and Colorado to eventually outpace the more average Kelowna and Maine, and at the very end Nevada will keep being extremely mediocre.

Anyway, I am going to leave you with this, and see you next time when I decide to reheat this word vomit for some extra SHL monies.

W19eaver · 12-13-2020, 12:36 PM

Snoopdogg · 12-13-2020, 12:53 PM

predicting "J" is like you said very unpredictable but I would say that would be true for the lower tier teams I think. Weird shit happens and teams go on incredible stretches. Top tier teams usual are straight forward

Evok · 12-13-2020, 03:08 PM

**leafs1997** · 12-13-2020, 04:15 PM

LordBirdman · 12-13-2020, 06:18 PM

mee · 12-13-2020, 09:14 PM

...
O this wasn't a very nice article about us..

Too bad

Whalers

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