The Contrarian provides a top-50 update and wishes you a happy holidays!

Earlier in the summer I posted a column about a free contest where I asked you to predict the Top 50 players based on total points. The reason behind the contest was to see if the consensus picks were better or worse than the individual predictions of the participants.

The actual entries and standings can be found in the forum, click here to see, however, this article is going to focus on the consensus and other interesting information.

There are 18 participants, and as of Tuesday Dec 23^rd, the best of which has a Missed Opportunity score of 260 points and the worst 330. The consensus score would be 296 and that would rank 15^th. That means only four participants are doing worse than the consensus.

If someone were to just use last year's Top 50 rankings that would earn them a Missed Opportunity score of 345, placing them dead last among the competitors. At least for now it shows that using the previous year's results isn't a solid plan.

Looks pretty good but let us dig further.

There are 15 players (21 because of a tie at the 50^th spot, but only one of those players could rank as the 50^th best) which none of our participants selected. It didn't matter where the player was predicted to be, thirty percent of the Top 50, was not selected by any of our participants. Some of these guys rank very high too.

Vladimir Tarasenko (sixth), Mark Giordano (12^th), Jiri Hudler (15^th), Filip Forsberg (16^th), Nick Foligno (17^th), Nikita Kucherov (18^th), Kevin Shattenkirk (32^nd), Brock Nelson (34^th), Jaden Schwartz (39^th), Ryan Callahan (40^th), Brent Burns (41^st), Johnny Gaudreau (42^nd), Kris Versteeg (47^th) and Jori Lehtera (48^th) all clearly make the Top 50 with 25 points or more. The players not selected that are tied with Pavel Datsyuk for 50^th are Alex Galchenyuk, Tyler Toffoli, Sami Vatanen, Derek Brassard, TJ Brodie, Valtteri Filppula and John Carlson. Chances are that if you have any of these players on your points only league rosters you got them at a good price and are doing well. That doesn't help though in predicting that these guys were going to this well.

Another eight players were selected by less than half the participants, Tyler Johnson (13^th), Rick Nash (14^th), Mike Ribiero (29^th) and Ryan Kesler (36^th) just to name a few.

The flipside to this are those players that were selected by everyone (or mostly everyone) and are not in the Top 50.

Those players include, David Krejci, Patrick Sharp, Nathan MacKinnon, Jordan Eberle, Chris Kunitz, Matt Duchesne, Taylor Hall, Corey Perry, Anze Kopitar, Martin St. Louis, Blake Wheeler, Erik Karlsson, Thomas Vanek, and Eric Staal.

Sure some of those players have had injuries but not all of them. Within the competitors the fact that most of them had these players kind of washes out. That doesn't mean that they were good predictions though. The consensus would be earning worse score.