What happens when you take one of the worst possession teams in the league and regress their goaltending back down to average? Last place! However, comfort with analytics wasn’t a pre-requisite to predict this tumble, as analysts of all stripes placed last year’s divisional champions in the bottom half this year. Interestingly, only Grant Jenkins had them in dead last, where they are most likely to finish. In fact, there’s an outside chance they can finish 28^th overall and get a good ticket in the Connor McDavid lottery.

Pacific Division

The Pacific Division has been a little bit more unpredictable, in a sense. Four teams were pegged within a single position in the standings, and two more within two positions, but the number of points required for teams to fall within those expected positions were quite high in all but two cases (Vancouver and San Jose).

Team        Win% Current Expected Difference Luck Index Projected

Anaheim     .721   1st     2nd      +8 pts      +3 pts     1st

Vancouver   .613   2nd     4th      +3 pts       0 pts   2nd-4th

San Jose    .606   3rd     3rd        N/A       -1 pt    2nd/3rd

Los Angeles .576   4th     1st     -10 pts      -1 pt    3rd-5th

Calgary     .545   5th     7th     +16 pts      +2 pts   4th/5th

Arizona     .419   6th     5th      -8 pts      -3 pts     6th

Edmonton    .303   7th     6th      -8 pts     -10 pts     7th

The Ducks are a runaway favorite for the divisional crown, and Arizona and Edmonton will almost certainly finish sixth and seventh respectively, but almost anything could happen in the middle. Most likely, San Jose will edge Vancouver for second, while Los Angeles finishes far closer to those two teams than to Calgary in fifth.

Anaheim Ducks

Anaheim is a sparkling 10-0 in one-goal games decided in regulation. It also have four empty-netters while allowing two, potentially making a close-game record of 14-2. Can this continue? Well, last year’s best close-game regulation record (Colorado) was 26-11, so probably not. The Ducks are nevertheless a strong team, and has built up a lead in the standings that should hold up through the remaining games, as just over half the analysts predicted.

Vancouver Canucks

The Canucks went off the board with a great possession-focused AHL coach, Willie Desjardins, and the results have been fantastic. Radim Vrbata has helped rejuvenate the Sedins, and the team has enjoyed far more secondary scoring than anyone could have hoped, with many players on track for career scoring highs. Being in second place is quite unexpected, with only two analysts, Donny Rivette and Adam Rickert, having predicted such. While there’s great risk of the Canucks slipping down the standings once the team’s scoring cools and the blue line thins out with injuries, only six more analysts even had them in third. This team is not out of the woods yet, though, with a 16% to 30% chance of missing the playoffs in consecutive seasons for the first time since 2000.

San Jose Sharks

Things are unfolding largely as expected this year in San Jose, who are on pace for about 95 points. That’s still cutting it pretty close, however. The Sharks currently have about a 20% to 33% chance of missing the playoffs for only the second time since 1997 — although only 10 analysts predicted them to tumble outside the division’s top three.

Los Angeles Kings

The most pessimistic predictions for Los Angeles involved third place, and only 10 analysts were even prepared to go that low. What happened? As covered in a recent ESPN piece, the team’s possession numbers have dropped, largely because of some blue line absences that are no longer forcing teams to dump-and-chase. That means the first place predictions were clearly wrong, that the champs are finally vulnerable, and that they will actually be scratching and clawing for a playoff spot if and when the goaltending cools down.

Calgary Flames

The Flames hopefully enjoyed their great start, because this is clearly the rebuilding team that everybody saw in September. True, there were a dozen analysts that saw the Flames finishing fifth or better, but the recent six-game losing skid has thrown some cold water on the optimists. This is one of the worst possession teams in the league, and while they are well-coached and have a great top pairing, we’re starting to see what happens to this team when its shooting percentage drops below an unsustainably high 11%. While winning is never a bad thing, the sad news for Flames fans is that the hot start is more likely to deny them a good draft pick than it is to get them a wild card spot – but at least they have that shot.

Arizona Coyotes

New name, same result. Most experts pegged Arizona for fifth, but sixth was also seen as a strong possibility. This is a surprisingly disappointing team defensively, which is further aggravated by Mike Smith struggling through his worst season ever. The team’s playoff hopes are essentially over, and it’s in a roughly four-way race for the third best ticket in the McDavid lottery.

Edmonton Oilers

The Oilers may be bad, but they’re not this bad. An 0-5 record in overtime, 0-1 in the shootout, a 7-12 close-game regulation record, a 7.3% team shooting percentage, and an opponent shooting percentage of 10.8% all add up to a miserable record for an otherwise near-average team. Only a quarter of the experts predicted the Oilers would trail the Pacific division (Dobber even had as high as them fourth), and now they’re battling Buffalo for the Connor McDavid ticket.

Closing Thoughts

No reasonable fan expects the experts to be right 100% of the time, but they would like to know what happened when they get one wrong, and see that information influence future predictions.

This exercise can also help those remaining fans who still see pre-season predictions as anything more than an entertaining point-in-time perspective. I’ve seen so many fans that take them far too seriously when even the collected wisdom of almost 100 experts can only peg five of these 14 teams within five points after only 30 games. The end-of-season standings are really anybody’s guess. Have a safe holiday, and enjoy the balance of the 2014-15 season!