The Hockey PDOcast - Episode 104: Predicting The 2016-2017 Standings Using Models

Episode Date: October 6, 2016

Micah Blake McCurdy joins the show to help preview the upcoming season, and predict how the standings will wind up shaking out using his new model. Here’s a quick rundown of the topics covered: 0:30 Predictive Models 7:30 Coaching influence on predictions 18:30 How much better can the Avalanche get? 26:30 California Teams vs. The Oilers 28:20 Can the Predators take the West? 30:45 Signs of decline for the Blackhawks 32:15 Rangers & Canadiens being reliant on goaltending This episode is brought to you by Freshbooks, an online accounting service designed to save time and help avoid all of the stresses that come with running a small business. They’re currently offering a free 30-day trial to listeners of our show at Freshbooks.com/PDOcast (just remember to enter “Hockey PDOcast” in the ‘How You Heard About Us’ section). Every episode of this podcast is available on iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher and can also be streamed straight from this website. Make sure to subscribe to the show so that you don’t miss out on any new episodes as they’re released. All ratings and reviews of the show are greatly appreciated. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices If you'd like to gain access to the two extra shows we're doing each week this season, you can subscribe to our Patreon page here: www.patreon.com/thehockeypdocast/membership If you'd like to participate in the conversation and join the community we're building over on Discord, you can do so by signing up for the Hockey PDOcast's server here: https://discord.gg/a2QGRpJc84 The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rogers Media Inc. or any affiliate.

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My name is Dimitri Filipovich. And joining me is the reigning, defending, undisputed hockey viz champion of the world. Micah Blake McCurdy. Micah, what's going on, man? I'm well. How are you doing? I'm good, man. I'm excited to have you on.

The season's right around the corner, and that means a blank slate for, I guess, in theory, all 30 teams, though some teams are at a bit of a disadvantage compared to the others, but the possibilities are endless. And, you know, we sort of have to, it's up to us as quote-unquote hockey analysts to figure out what's going to happen moving forward. And I think that the prediction model that you released earlier this week is going to help us make a more educated guess. Well, I sure hope so.

I mean, that's the idea, of course, is to try to get a hold of as many factors as I can sensibly and see how they all interplay, because you can never tell just by sort of taking your eye over a roster and guessing. Well, I'm pretty sure that most people listening to this show have already read it over and over many times, but for those that haven't, I guess I'll give you an opportunity here to introduce Cordelia and sort of everything that goes into coming up with that final output. Okay, so the complexity is about as deep as you want, so we'll give you the quick overview, first of all. So the idea is to predict individual games, to try to calculate what the probability

is of a given team winning a given game. So for every game in the upcoming season, I made a projected roster for both teams based on on past ice time for all of the people who are listed on the rosters so far, including some depth, some depth guys, they get in the rosters less often, people who are likely to be call-ups who've played in the NHL before, in some cases, rookies. And so from those projected rosters, I feed those into a prediction model that I've trained on the last nine seasons of data, which looks at some five-on-five terms, how teams generate shots, how good their goaltenders are, how good their shooters are. And then some special teams terms as well, how good their power plays are,

how good their penalty kill is, and then as well as some rest. So if teams have played recently, then they get hurt. And if teams have had lots of rest and they get a bonus. So those things are trained so that all of those things come up with a probability for who's going to win each game, or rather how likely each team is going to win each game. And home ice advantage, of course, it's included in that too. So once I've got that, then I can simulate an entire. season where I can basically flip 1,230 weighted coins, 82 coins for each team.

And see how many times you win or lose. And for each game, I also flip another coin to the side if it was settled in regulation or in overtime or in a shootout. And then I do that a million times and to get a whole bunch of different simulations. So in some simulations, your favorite team did extremely well and took the president's trophy in a romp. And in some simulations, your team did extremely poorly and came last of all. but then the weaker teams do the latter thing much more often and the stronger teams do the former thing much more often.

And so in addition to getting some likely estimates, you know, probably your team will have 83 points or 75 points or 92 points, also a spread. This is the range of expectations that we saw. So plus or minus four points or plus or minus eight points or plus or minus however many points it might be, which is part of why I really like taking a simulation approach is that I can get not just estimates of points, but also just how likely they are to range around how sure I am of those numbers. Right. I feel like that's a common criticism we get sometimes online from listeners and readers and commenters where you say you think something's going to happen.

And if it doesn't happen, the person goes like, oh, well, your numbers were clearly wrong. You're an idiot without realizing that there's a lot of wiggle room involved and a lot of uncertainty. I mean, there is a reason they actually play the games and we don't just do it on paper. well the the most extreme probability for a single game that i've that i've calculated that i was that i had any trust in was something like 35 percent and that's the that was in the dark days of the sabres being as bad as they ever were a couple years back the and and that was when they were playing powerhouse western coast teams the and so even then even in the the most

extreme matchup imaginable you were still looking at at the weaker team winning one out of every three times. That's the kind of uncertainty that you're dealing with. And I think anybody who's trying to predict the standings, anybody who's trying to predict anything in hockey has to have a lot of of space in their models for unpredictability. There's a lot of random stuff that happens every game. Well, I think there's also, and there's like an interplay of many different factors, as you noted in your piece, that are tough for you to include in sort of calculating this. And one of them is obviously the aging curve, right? Like, there are teams that are collectively younger that could theoretically improve quite a bit from one season to the next, but we're not necessarily

sure how much they're going to improve. And then the same goes the other way where if you have an older team, it's quite possible, you know, a couple of guys on that team lose a step, and all of a sudden that's, you know, the thing that does you in as a team. So weighing all of that is a pretty tricky proposition. Yeah. And so my most recent model doesn't include any aging effects. And not for lack of desire. I've worked on it more or less continuously all summer

to include the effects that I've got. And so I'm already penciling down what it is I'm planning to put in the future your models. And so aging is definitely part of that, but it's a reasonably subtle question. And part of the trouble, of course, is that young players generally get better,

but they don't always. There's plenty of guys who bust, who just never developed the way that people hope that they will. And so you have to be very subtle and you have to give yourself a lot of room for wiggle room there too when you try to interpret how players are going to progress. Yeah. And then the other one obviously is as you noted coaching, right? Well, coaching is a tremendous pain. And from the point of view of modeling, it's extremely interesting from the point of view of fans when you, you know, you can debate endlessly and people love to about exactly what influences coaches have and people

love to lament how their coaches make what they consider clearly brain dead decisions. You know, Buck Showalter is certainly getting raked over the cold of these days for not using his amazing closer in a single game winner take-all X-training situation last night. Right. In the wildcard game for the Blue Jays and the Orioles. But that's reasonably rare in hockey to be able to say, oh, you know, there was one clearly bad coaching decision, and here's exactly the effect that it had. And here's what would have happened if they've made a better decision.

We don't get experiments like that very often, and so you have to be quite careful and subtle to try to tease apart coaching effects. So I haven't for this model this past year, but if I think of good ways to do it, I'll definitely be including coaching effects in the future. Well, I mean, okay, so with all those caveats out of the way,

let's actually sink our teeth into trying to reconstruct this 2016, 2017-standing's picture. And I think, you know, talking about the coaching, there are, I think, four teams that, you know, could realistically either go up or down from where you've projected them on your model just based on how big of an impact those coaches have. I mean, there should be five, but Michelle Tarian, for whatever reason, keeps his job. So we're only at four for now.

But I think the one that could be the most impactful in kind of influencing the rest of the league and the trickle-down effect it has is the Ducks replacing Busboudro, who, you know, he has, out of active coaches, he has the highest regular season winning percentage, and it was the quickest coach to 400 wins. And as all these ridiculous stats, that kind of show that he is a really good coach, and they've replaced him with Randy Carlisle and his trusty toaster.

So I think for Anaheim fans, it's a bit alarming that your model has them right on the edge of the playoffs there, and that's even before accounting for the fact that Carlisle might be a massive downgrade. I think, I mean, I agree with the sort of conventional analytical wisdom that Carlisle is a very large downgrade on Boutreau. it's about pretty much a dramatic a coaching impact as you can make from one side to the other

on the other hand it's it's very easy to get caught in a trap where because you notice a lot of people making bad decisions or you notice a particular person making a lot of decisions that are clearly bad it's easy to fall into a trap where you assume that those

decisions must be having a large impact because there are so many one of the things that I like to make models for and one of the real challenges when you're trying to model coaching impact. If you put the wrong guy over the boards for an empty net situation, for instance, you know, you need an extra attacker and you send over Ryan Kessler, even though his scoring days are long behind him,

when you could have sent over, you know, somebody like Ricard Raquel perhaps. You could say, well, that looks like a mistake to me, and maybe it is. But then you quantify and you say, well, it's actually only a handful of seconds in only a handful of games in which the expected winning percentage, if you do the best possible thing is not that great. Right. So the total impact you're making there, you know, maybe it's not so large. And it's easy to get confused by how obviously bad the decision is

to think that that means that it must matter somehow. You know, because I saw it, because I noticed it because I picked it up. You know, that means it has to matter. And a lot of the decisions that coaches make that have a lot of impact are often, at least to my eye, the sorts of things which aren't very salient, that aren't really obvious. They don't impress themselves on the minds of the people who are watching a particular game at a particular time. Right.

Yeah, no, that's a good point. It is kind of easy to overvalue that and obviously look back in hindsight at what could have been. But I think that for the Ducks, like, they're in an interesting spot here because they've been so close to reaching the top of the mountain. I mean, they've lost, what, in the game seven, four years in a row, and two of those years, they lost to the eventual Stanley Cup champions. and they obviously have a lot of talent. So it's kind of weird for me because I know that a lot of analytically inclined people are kind of writing them off and being like, well, a Randy Carlisle team obviously is going to take a massive step back and can't get anything done this year.

But then I do look at the collection of players they have. And it's quite possible that, you know, they could still have a very, very good season, even if we disagree with some of the kind of decisions in a vacuum that Carlisle makes. Sure. And the, I mean, there's no question. question that they've been more unlucky than unskilful in when it comes to those sorts of things. You know, losing in Game 7, especially in later rounds of playoffs, requires the kind of team that can win a lot of games. And the emotional pain of it of watching a very high-leverage game go against

you is one thing. And it's not the same as saying that the team is somehow weak or somehow structured wrong. It would be interesting to see, to try to, to quantify precisely those coaching changes. You know, this is about as close to a natural experiment as we'll get, or you could say something like, you know, this is where I think I am will place with this coach and this is where it's another coach. And now we're going to see, you know, a real swing with a new coach. It's going to be fun.

Well, especially since it's pretty clear that at the start of, you know, for a few years there, they were doing a lot of winning and they were winning all these close one-goal games. We were wondering how they were doing it. And they weren't a very good possession team by any means. And then we saw at some point about maybe a third of the way into, last year or maybe even a bit before that, they clearly changed their tactics and became, you know, sort of tried to play the LA Kings model a bit more and they controlled a much

heavier percentage of the shot attempts on the ice. And it'll be fascinating to see right now if, you know, as you mentioned, if Carlisle comes in and all of a sudden they crater back down to like a 48% possession team or something like that, it'll be kind of an indictment on the job he's done and maybe it'll give us an even bigger appreciation for the job Bruce Booz-Boozrood did last year. I think it might And part of the For me one of the The real litmus tests for that

For Boudre this year Will be what he does with Ryan Kessler The Who's Who still has You know quite a bit of miles left on him But also has

Has a tremendous And obvious Downswing in terms of his effectiveness Which I think is almost entirely Caused by age And perhaps in his case He's exacerbated By the style of game that he played

You know We don't We don't have quantitative models for that, although some people, maybe we should. But certain players certainly seem to age more, more viciously, if that's the phrase I want. And, well, and of course, this is always the way. And growth in young players is almost always slow and decline in old players is almost always really fast. Where, and part of the versatility there is that veteran players generally have tricks,

they generally have the kind of experience that lets them stave off, the effective aging, at least for a short time. they adjust their game, they make adjustments here, they stopgap this by playing in a slightly different way. You know, we've seen Jerome McGinland extend the useful length of his career by several years more than I think was expected. For instance, when he left Calgary, he's changed his style of play a lot. Whereas Ryan Kessler has barely changed his style of play at all, and I think the signs of

where are starting to show there. And if Carlisle decides that he's going to have to get, you know, 18 minutes a night out of Ryan Kessler, then I think we're going to start to see a bloodbass really fast in the that I'm. Yeah. And I mean, just thinking about it right now, just based on the types of players, Randy Carlis likes and the way we've seen that he likes to operate, I have a feeling that is going to be the case. Well, I mean, that's precisely why it's so interesting to me. It's not just that, I guess it's not just an old player, you know, an old, very skilled player in his decline. He's precisely the kind of forward that a coach like, like Bruce Boudreau, sorry. I mean,

well, Bruce Boodro would like touch forwards too, but precisely a coach that Randy Carlisle would really love to have. Yeah. And then so, okay, so for the sake of equilibrium and kind of keeping everything in the universe aligned and making sense, Bruce Boudreau goes to the wild and your model has them looking pretty good. And I don't know, they're an interesting team to me because I do like the individual players they have when I look at that roster.

I think that there is something there. But for whatever reason last year, I don't know if it was just that Mike Yo and John Turchetti didn't do a good job or I don't know what was going on. But it seemed like everything wasn't. adding up to being as good as it should be. So I'm kind of fascinated to see whether Boudreau can push the right buttons and put the guys in a position to succeed like we've seen him do in the past. So I'm very curious there.

I didn't highlight them in my preview as people whose coaching was especially interesting to me because I was reasonably high on Yor Antarcetti. And so I have a very strong opinion of Bruce Boudreau, and I think there's an improvement in coaching there, but I don't know if it's such a dramatic improvement as a dramatic change like we've seen in some of the other teams. And that said, you know, on paper when you compare the Minnesota and the Anaheim rosters, for instance, you see something is very, very similar.

Right. You know, both of those teams are right. You know, for instance, in the projections that I did, Minnesota, I'm projecting to 94 points, and Anaheim projecting to 93 points. So it's not like, and there's two teams in between them, too. It's not like it's a, I mean, it's really jam-packed, sort of close to the playoff line in the West. Right. So the variability, the potential for variability there is really huge.

And part of what makes Minnesota especially interesting and especially tricky to get a hold of is the fact that their goaltending has been even more variable in the last several years than typical goaltending has been, even without changing goaltenders. So Devin Dubnick, I mean, every single player in the league plays hot and cold, every goalie plays hot and cold. It's just the nature of performance. But Dubnick has looked league best and league worst in. within the stretches of 30 or 40 games. It's bizarre.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm not quite sure what to make of it myself. I mean, goaltending is tricky enough as is, but it definitely feels like Duminic, even himself, is even trickier than some of the other guys.

I don't know. I'm still optimistic about that team. I think that, I mean, you mentioned how they're similar with the ducks. They have that really good young decor, and they're deep there,

and they have good forwards. Like, it makes sense. They could theoretically just roll four lines of players that can play fast and score goals. And, you know, they're definitely not short on talent, but for whatever reason, it just seems like things haven't added up. So I'm kind of curious to see whether they'll be able to kind of get over that hump and challenge the Central's best teams. Well, part of why I think it makes sense to talk about that in the context of coaches is that I think one of the primary roles of coaches is to be a buffer between the randomness

of natural variation of results and the players on the roster themselves. We have to be able to say, you know, last night was a great night, but we're not going to win like that every night. We have to go back to playing a different way. Or say, you know, that was, be able to say, you know, the last 10 games,

it feels like forever we've been losing, but actually we only lost six of those games. You know, this is why it's not going to keep on going this way. This is how we're going to keep on steadying the ship. How, you know, the practical details of how you forget about games which are no longer relevant to you and how you forget about results which don't represent your true talent.

I feel like coaches have a real frontline role in actually performing that task of making sure that you don't get caught up in the, oh, you know, our starter has posted terrible results for four games in a row. You know, it doesn't mean that he's washed up. It doesn't mean that he's somehow terrible.

You know, this is how we're going to find a pass through to consistency. That I think coaches have a real role there. And so Boutre might be unusually suited. as the kind of person who's, you know, in a profession not famous for level heads, who's among the more level-headed of the available coaches. Yes. Well, I'm glad you set that out.

There was a perfect segue to talk about the Colorado Avalanche, speaking of coaches that aren't level-headed and the guy that went out the door. I don't know, like, first of all, before we get into the moves Avalanche made this summer, let's give one up to them hiring our guy, Eric Parnas. I'm kind of bummed out that he won't be able to come on the show. go anymore and drop special teams knowledge on us, but it's a great opportunity for him, and I'm sure he's going to kill it there. But I think, you know, for all intents and purposes, it seems like that's just another sign that the abs kind of, I don't know if they're turning

the corner, but it seemed to be on the right path just based on the moves they made this summer, where they hired some smart people, they got rid of some dead weight. They took some calculated cheap flyers on players that could potentially pan out for them and exceed the value that they're paying them. And I just, I like that they didn't overreact and make any splash trades or signings, but at the same time, your model has them as the worst team in the Western Conference, which kind of surprised me a little bit. So, I mean, again, the lack of coaching, of taking coaching into effect is definitely a problem there.

I personally expect the Colorado will overperform the 84 points that I gave them. Just how much, just how far they can climb out of that hole, I'm not sure. Personally, I don't expect them to challenge for a playoff spot, but at a guess. but they'll definitely do better than 84 points. And part of why is that is that one of the things that I've found most strongly predicts losing, if you like,

is giving up lots and lots of shots. And specifically, that's the one, in terms of on-eye statistics, that's the one stat which appears to be most susceptible to coaching effects. Right. The offense tends to be more player-driven.

Goaltending is definitely very, very player-driven. And if you change a head coach, you don't normally expect to see a change in some goalie stats, or even really special team stats, which are the province of specialized coaches. But the 5-on-5 defensive zone system, I mean, we'll see what it's like when Bedner manages to implement it. And there'll be some teething problems like there are with all coaches,

good or bad, as when they're new. But I expect a very substantial uptick in that part of the ice, because Patrick Watt's defensive zone system, among other things, gave up a very very large number of shots and put a lot of pressure on a goalie. And some sense, the kind of system you'd imagine

from somebody who was a star goalie. Yeah, no, just watching them. Obviously, you know, they're not flush with defensive talent by any means, but there's that, and then there's sort of not seeming to have any sort of plan and everyone just kind of running around as if it's five guys that just dropped in

for a beer league game and haven't actually practiced together. So I think that just tidying that up a little bit could really go a long way for the abs. And I definitely think that while it'll be tough for them to make the playoffs in that central division, I'd be hard pressed to make any sort of arguments that, you know, they're going to be the worst team of the Western Conference considering the Vancouver Canucks are still playing in the Western Conference as much, as, you know, unless something's changed and I haven't noticed. Well, the Canucks only have one point, four points margin on them on the, on the avalanche at the moment.

And so it wouldn't take very much of a coaching improvement to just flip that switch for sure. And, of course, the other thing is that is that I think. that the two teams will behave quite differently at the deadline depending on their relative fortunes. We'll see, Jim Benning is also hard to predict. I don't have GM terms in my model either. But if the Canucks are towards the bottom of the league at the deadline, I have to imagine

that there'll be pressure on Jim Benning probably reasonably to sell the Sedin's to try to actually trigger a serious rebuild where they can... I mean, if you could sell them both as as a sort of twin rental I mean, that's not what I mean they're not on contractors, but the

value you could get there would be enormous if you wanted to actually rebuild. And perhaps they will if they're in the basement of the conference, as I think is likely. And then of course, if they do such a thing, then they'll solidify their position towards the bottom of the standings. Yeah. Some of the other teams, Buffalo, for instance, they're not going to do that even if

they're in a terrible spot. And I don't expect Colorado will either. Yeah. No, well, the weird thing about that, though, is I mean, And we sort of saw last year and just judging the kind of seeing what's going on here in Vancouver. It's, I honestly think that this team views itself as, you know, they were unlucky last year and they could conceivably make a run this year and be more competitive. And I mean, even last year, they really should have sold off a lot of their parts, but they kind of just were, we're happy to stand pat and keep a guy like Dan Hammews and not really do anything. So I don't know. I don't really know what's going on with that front office or anything.

But I think that they would be a pretty good bet for me to finish. with the worst record in the Western Conference? They're my personal pick. In fact, I think they'll probably be 30th in the week when by the time all the dust is settled. Even though they didn't come 30th in my projection, it's one of the nice things about making the model yourself is that you know, you know the weaknesses of the model better than anybody else, although Sabres fans who aren't terribly happy with their existing position

have been loquacious on Twitter with me. And so you make your own adjustments. If I knew how to make quantitative adjustments that I could apply broadly across all 32, teams then I would build that into my model, but you make your own ad hoc adjustments yourself, where you think, or, you know, the model doesn't know that Los Angeles's players are all getting really old. They don't know that, you know, the Buffalo's players, they're better players, especially are really young, you know, or that Vancouver's players are also reasonably old, most of them that are going to get lots of minutes, you know, coaching changes all there and so on and so forth.

So you make, you make those adjustments, you know, on the fly in your head. And again, you have to judge against, guard against that same temptation we were talking about before, about imagining that the things that you notice are somehow, they must be really important for that reason. There's a tendency to be really overdramatic. You know, you say, Los Angeles, as their older players,

are likely going to regress. They're not going to do that well. And so, you know, it takes a lot of previously good players being a lot worse than before to shave, you know, 20 points off of the team's standing, which is, you know, or even five or six points is a loss

over the course of the season. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. All right, one final coaching. situation and then we'll move on is one that's a situation that's near and dear to your heart. It's Guy Boucher in Ottawa and we just discussed the abs and how

a coaching come in and really change the defensive system and stop a team from bleeding so many shots. And I think that that would go a long way towards improving the senators' chances and trying to kind of pull them out of this mediocrey they seem to be deeply entrenched in. So I'm very optimistic

for Bouchet. I mean we haven't seen any of the health results from him in a long time. good or bad, but judging purely on the kinds of things that he's saying, media, the sort of attitudes that he's taking the way that he's been putting together, lines and pairs and both in practice and games looks very optimistic. Part of the curiosity is that under Paul McLean, the senators played a kind of sort of Dallas light, lots of shots against, but also lots of shots for. And when, and James Cameron's system, in an attempt to address

perceived defensive weaknesses mostly only accomplished sealing off the senator's own shots and didn't really do anything to improve shot against totals. It's easy to imagine that defense and offense are sort of intrinsically linked somehow, although I found that they're much less

length than is commonly thought. So I'll be very interesting to see in practice, if Boucher takes an offense first to prove in the sense of making sure that they get the kind of zone time and shot pressure that they need to contest games. That was an amazing. I think you actually called him James Cameron instead of Dave Cameron there, which is a... I did.

Amazing Freudian slip because he was definitely directing a sinking ship. Yeah, I'm sorry, I keep on thinking of Dave Cameron. Speaking of directing a sinking ship, as the man who oversaw Brexit. Yes. All right, let's move on. I have a couple quick hitters for you here. I kind of want to get out of the way before we let you go. And the first one I'll start with is, let's say one of the California teams,

whether it's the ducks or let's say the kings, all of a sudden all their players get old at the same time and they fall off. One of these teams falls off for whatever reason. Is Connor McDavid going to be good enough this season to almost single-handedly drag the Oilers up to, I don't know, the best year they've had in pretty much a decade? The best year in a decade for the Oilers, I think, unless I'm forgetting some illustrious years in the past decade,

I think that's very much on the card. So McDavid's numbers were, his scoring numbers were extremely strong last year when he wasn't hurt. And so, of course, he's going to be leaned upon very, very hard, and he's going to be targeted, and so making sure that he stays healthy is going to be a challenge, and it's going to be really important for them. But they're not, the Oilers are not especially far out of the playoffs,

I don't think, on paper right now, something like 88 points, give or take, and it looks like the cutoff is about four or five points more than that. That's the kind of variance between them and a playoffs, but especially if a team like Anaheim were to falter, and especially if a team like Chicago say were to also falter yet further, it doesn't seem at all unusual to me that they might be able to make the playoffs. I don't know about how much of a deep run that you can produce, I'm not sure.

Right. But I think it's probably more likely that they don't, but I would not be at all surprised. You know, 40%, 30% results are the sorts of things that you see all the time from a handful of teams every year. Yeah. No, I mean, honestly, kind of if you just took a step back and looked at it objectively in a vacuum, you could definitely make an argument for the oilers, you know, hitting 90 points or whatever and getting into the playoffs. But then it's kind of tough as a human being, not to, you're just conditioned to think that something is going to go wrong, and it's going to wind up being a, you know,

a series of hilarious misfortunes, and we're going to wind up kind of joking about how this always happens to the Oilers. It's really tough not to, like, have that just, like, clouding your judgment when making these picks. Well, and they, you know, within, it's not, it's not like the most recent thing to look at is, is even the most recent games. I think we've seen some decisions come out of the Oilers in the last four or five months since the games have ended, and some of them extremely questionable. The Taylor Hall Trade, I think, is a big step back.

McDavid, in his second year, is going to be a big step forward. Yes, he pulled your RV. He's going to be an excellent player for them, too. Juan Luchich, not nearly as badly as maligned, but also, you know, sufficiently old to be to be courting decline from age as well. So there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of on-paper improvements, but then there's also some on-paper regressions or unimprovements, I guess, I should say. So there's more than enough space for confusion about if they're,

if they're going to look considerably better than last year or not. Yeah, yeah, it seems like definitely didn't do themselves many favors. All right, next one. I really want to pick the Nashville Predators to win the Western Conference. Is Peca René and his sub-9-10, say, percentage, the only kind of realistic thing that can throw a wrench into those plans, or is there something else I should be worried about? I don't see anything else to be worried about.

And even René, I don't see as the kind of Achilles heel in practice that some people see him as. I don't have an extremely high opinion of how much he can contribute still to the team, but I think he's sufficiently close to the end of his career that if he puts up, you know, lots and lots of dreadful games early on, which is perfectly possible, then I think you'll just see Mazzanick or somebody else further down the depth chart come in and take his minutes. And I think they've got a really solid pipeline of goaltenders in Nashville who are going to make that be not nearly as big as a problem.

And they also have the kind of defense core that can make life easy on a goaltender. There's a lot to be optimistic about there in Nashville. And, you know, I think I still favor the Kings myself for the West, but there's, you know, there's a lot of good reason to think that Nashville will seriously contest for the top spot on the West. Yeah, yeah, I think they're going to be kind of a fun team to watch. All right, next one. I know we saw some of the writing on the wall last season where this team started to kind of show

some cracks in their armor, and particularly as the year it went along where their underlying numbers dropped quite a bit, and it was Patrick Kane and the power play, and Corey Crawford's play, really kind of dragging them along for the ride, and they weren't the team that we'd seen in years past. But do you think we're going to kind of continue to see that decay with the Blackhawks and all the way to the point where they could potentially miss the playoffs? Or do you think that, you know, they're not going to be necessarily as good as we've seen in years past, but they're going to hang around and still be kind of a tricky, tricky out? sort of a mix of both of those things.

I think the people who are picking them to be towards the top of the league, I think, are blind to the clear changes that have gone on in the last few years. But I see them very definitely in the playoff mixture, in the mess of teams all contesting for playoff spots. I think it's going to be the central in particular, and just the West generally is leathily tight around the playoff. bubble and I think they're going to be in and amongst that bubble for pretty much the entire year. I expect, you know, people are going to be working at time-making scenarios,

and the Blackhawks are going to be part of that for pretty much the entire year. So, you know, they're in that uncomfortable spot where you say, you know, yes, they're getting worse, but then they're getting worse from a position of being extremely good. So, you know, that leaves a very capable team, the kind of team that can still win a playoff series. Yeah. But also the kind of team that could easily, you know, miss the playoffs by four points. Yeah, yeah, especially in that division. All right. Last question. These are two teams I view very similarly in the sense that they kind of have flawed rosters. They have high-end talent up front, but there's a lot of question marks, particularly on the margins. And honestly, their fortunes are going to come down to how good and how well their goalies can hold up. And that's the Rangers and the Canadians. But your model seems to, it's like a four-point difference or so between them. What kind of separated the, I guess let me rephrase it. Why do you, I guess let me refer you. Why do you like the

Canadians more so than the Rangers? So the they both, like you say, they're both strongly, strongly dependent on their goaltenders. The, the Rangers also, after that though, they're quite different teams. The Rangers rely on shooting percentage

as their sort of secondary strength. They have some, they don't generate a lot of shots, but the shots that they generate tend to be very high quality and they can put them in. Montreal's shooting percentage is a weakness. Whereas in New York, York, the shot metrics are quite weak. The offensively, they generate a little bit less than the league average. Defensively, they're giving up a lot of shots. And there's not a lot of signs.

The defense core in New York, I think, is measurably worse than the defense core in Montreal, even with the downgrade of swapping out Suban for Weber. Especially as a group of six. In fact, I noticed Barbario is on the waiver. wire today, which is bizarre. I think that's playing with fire for Montreal. I think he should be in their regular six. So there's a lot of the, there's a lot of questions on the blue line in both teams. With Montreal, you tend to have sort of different symptoms of what might be similar

problems where the defense acquire the puck reasonably easily, but then they don't move it very well. Whereas with the Rangers, the problems that they don't acquire the

fuck very much. They generally play without it. They're not very aggressive. They don't attack very much. But in the same,

you know, it amounts to the same thing where they, the way to get out of their zone and into the next zones with possessions is really weak.

But once you get there, then the forward strength can take over. You know, and patcheretti, you know, still somehow remains underrated,

you know, despite years and years of glittering result. there must be maddening for him. I don't know how you can sort of go unnoticed in that kind of market with those kinds of numbers, but he does somehow. But that transition is organizationally really weak.

And with no discernible change in style or personnel, there's not a lot of hope really for both either team to mitigate those weaknesses. They still have the strengths that they have, but I don't see much path forward to fix those mistakes. well so I think they're going to remain that goalie driven for the for civil future. Yeah. Well, it's funny because, you know, we can spend so much time kind of dissecting all these factors and coming up with these well-thought-out projections, but then, you know, a team like

the Rangers or the Canadians, it's like I don't really want to be, I don't necessarily like their teams. And I think that, you know, they could totally crater, but then I don't really want to be the person betting against Henrik Lundquist or Carrie Price. So it kind of puts you in a tricky spot. So part of the difference there, I think, is that is that it's very, very, you know, easy when you're trying to talk about a team to think to imagine in your head a single game against that team where where a goaltender can just completely take over a game

and and every goaltender in the NHL has shown us at least once the ability to just completely win a game by themselves even really weak goaltenders have had have had their nights you know Ben Scrivens for instance was a run out of the league recently pretty much and he had a hundred shot shot out against San Jose within recent memory, one of the finest goaltending performances that we've seen in a long time. Every, which is not a knock on him particularly, but I mean that every single goaltender

has had that day where they personally win a game. But a game is just a game, and a season is 82 games, and it's not easy to put a season in your mind. In fact, even this is going to be a source of friction I can tell with myself and people on Twitter. This year's model uses player results from the last two years. My last year's model used team results

from the last 25 games, which is not a very long time. It's not even half of the season. And yet, very often I would get into arguments with people where I would say, this is what your team did over the last 25 games. See how it's very strong. And they would say, yeah, but we lost the last four games in a row.

Four games is really hardly any games compared to 25, even, let alone compared to 82. And so you don't see goaltenders, even ones in the very best class, even the best goaltender you could even imagine, is not capable of taking 82 games by this graph of the neck, not even 50 games, and winning them the way that you really do see a goaltender take a game or even a playoff series and just personally win it.

There's a difference of scale there that doesn't fit inside the mind very easily. Yeah, no, when you're... But you see it numerically. Yeah, you do. And, I mean, when you're fighting that, it's like an uphill battle if you keep kind of having a real ironer goalie and it's a tricky spot to be in. Micah, this is the part of the show where I kind of let you plug some work to help people where they can find your stuff online and do all that jazz. So the easiest place to find me is on Twitter where I basically live.

At ineffective math, an old in-joke about how I couldn't get a mathematics job. So you can find me there holding forth about my children when I'm not talking to hockey. They're very cute. They take good pictures. but you can also, but I have a website called HockeyViz.com, theizad.com, where I post charts for individual games as well as predictions. So the season preview is the main work of the summer,

and it's been, you can find a link there on the front page of HockeyViz.com where you can see in gory detail exactly where all 30 teams seem to fall in the scheme and just how tightly bunched and just how clear certain positions are. But then also through the year I'll be updating all the projections. And so once, you know, after you go on a 10-game tear, you know, how likely are you to make the playoffs now? And so those get posted every day at HockeyBiz.com. Perfect. Well, I'm looking forward to all the work.

Thanks for taking the time. And I'm sure we'll get you back on the show soon and chat again, okay? Thanks, Demetri. It's good to talk to you. Yeah. The Hockey PDOCast with Dmitri Filipovich. Follow on Twitter at Dimphilipovich and on SoundCloud at soundcloud. At soundcloud.com slash hockey pdocast.