Enter The Contrarian's Top 50 Free Contest!

About this time last year, I asked our readers if it was better to run with the pack or venture out on your own. To help find that answer, I ran a contest that asked each entrant to pick the exact order of finish for the NHL’s top 50 regular season point producers.

I took all 18 entries and evaluated by the total number of top 50 entries a player received, then the average rank they were predicted for, then in case of a tie between players, their final rank from the 2013-14 season to derive the consensus top 50.

Each entrant’s list was compared to the 2014-15 NHL rankings and the entries were scored based on how many missed opportunity points were earned. The fewer missed opportunity points earned, the better for the participants.

What is a missed opportunity point?

I will illustrate this with the small example I used last year.

Assume that I predicted a player order of:

Assume the results at the end of the season were:

So I was wrong with my order of prediction. Guy Lafleur was not the best player. The best player earned 115 points and Lafleur got 99. The missed opportunity is 16 points.

Marcel Dionne is ranked third in the final standings but he was tied for second with 103 points. In essence there was no missed opportunity.

Finally, Phil Esposito surpassed my expectations and did better than my predicted third place finish. He earned 115 points where the real third place player tallied 103 points. A difference of 12 missed opportunity points. The fact that Esposito did better than I expected should not benefit my score.

Add up all the missed opportunities, 16 + 0 + 12 = 28, would be my score. If I had gotten the order perfectly correct my score would have been zero.

The result was that three participants beat the Consensus Top 50 score of 488 points.

In order of finish (forum handle – number of missed opportunity points):

habs7079 – 465

Russian Rocket – 474

forumname – 482

(* it should be noted that Dobber’s projections from his 2014-15 guide would have also beaten the consensus with a score of 484)

But the question, to run with the pack or venture out on your own, remains to be answered.

Let us start with the 13 players who were not taken by any of our participants and yet were in the NHL’s top 50 point producers last year. Jiri Hudler (eighth), Vladimir Tarasenko (tied for tenth), Nick Foligno (tenth), Nikita Kucherov (tied for 28^th), Mark Stone (28^th), Johnny Gaudreau (28^th), Jaden Schwartz (tied 36^th), Filip Forsberg (36^th), Sean Monahan (40^th), Scott Hartnell (tied for 50^th), Tomas Plekanec (50^th), Derick Brassard (50^th), Brent Burns (50^th).

Quite a number of points that were missed upon but that no one picked any of those players suggest that these guys were sleepers. Good for you when you select them late in your draft, but not when you are building your draft list.

In a manner of speaking, someone else could swoop in and take one of those underrated players while you were snoozing and they ended up the better for it. For instance, Tyler Johnson was on only one participant’s list and was ranked for the 48^th spot. In fact, Johnson earned 72 points to tie for the 12^th overall NHL rank. The owner who had him on his list was our winner habs7079.

Another way of looking at it is by taking the players that were selected by every entrant and which did not make the NHL’s top 50. These seven players were Corey Perry, Matt Duchene, Patrick Sharp, Chris Kunitz, Nathan MacKinnon, Taylor Hall and David Krejci. Honourable mentions to Patrick Marleau, Eric Staal, Martin St. Louis, Tomas Vanek and Kyle Okposo who were taken by 17 of our participants.

Certainly there is a case to be made for running on your own.

However, here is the flip side. What would you expect to find with habs7079’s predictions? You probably expect a lot of perfect predictions or near misses.

In fact, he had one perfect prediction and it was Henrik Zetterberg at the 25^th spot. Predictions that earned five or less missed opportunity points ended up being 15 in total out of 50.

Contrast that to our second place forum member Russian Rocket 10, who had earned prefect predictions on Alexander Ovechkin, Claude Giroux, Joe Pavelski, Henrik Zetterberg, Alexander Steen and Mike Ribeiro. Add to that 15 more predictions that earned five or less missed opportunity points.

So how did he not win?

It is because of the nine predictions where he was off by more than 15 missed opportunity points, as compared to habs7079’s seven large misses.

Like swinging for the fences, you got to make it count and count often because if you do not you will just be whiffing away while everyone else is allowed to catch up.

Our member, forumname, who came in third place earned the second most perfect predictions with four. A couple of others earned three and almost everyone got at least one exact rank right. Those who did not register a perfect rank ended up at the back of the pack as you would expect.

Now I am willing to say that there simply was not enough data to properly answer the question and reason for all this. Only 18 people decided to partake in the free contest. It was also a down year in terms of league wide scoring.

So I will be running the contest again this year.

You can enter your top 50 list in the forum at any point in time between now and October 6, 2015 11:59 p.m. I want to submit an entry in the Top 50 Contest thread found under the FREE Dobber Sports Challenges forum.

Do not enter by commenting on this article because as Dobber pointed out to me the comments can be lost.

If there is a tie between several member scores, then the first and only tiebreaker will be the date and time of entry where older entries will be ranked higher than newer ones. If you can predict the outcome accurately and earlier than everyone else then you deserve a better rank.

Please enter the rank beside the full player name. Example, 50 – Brad Richards is good but 50 – Richards is not good because I will not know if you mean Brad or Mike Richards.

You may change or edit your list but the date and time of the edit becomes the submission entry date and time.

One entry per member.

After the deadline passes, I will determine what the consensus top 50 player order is. The first factor will be the total number of top 50 entries a player receives, then the average rank they are predicted for, then in case of a tie between players, their rank last season as determined by the NHL 2014-15 final standings.

Not only will I evaluate the consensus picks and where they end up as compared to everyone else but I will also compare where last season’s top 50 list ends up too. By the way, if you took the 2013-14 NHL top 50 list and used it as-is for predicting the 2014-15 list, you would have ended up in last with 594 missed opportunity points.

I want to find out, and hopefully you do as well, where the consensus gets us and how many individuals can surpass it.

How hard can it be?

Psst… You can always purchase Dobber’s 2015-16 Fantasy Hockey Guide to help you out.