My Playoff Predictions

April 12th, 2009, 2 Comments »

I participated in a playoff pool draft tonight, so I had to map out my predictions of who would make it to the finals. As you might imagine, it’s as much about picking the teams as it is the players. A mediocre player who plays 22 post-season games is more valuable than a great player who only plays seven:

Fairfield, 12-Apr-09

Yes, I think the Canucks will beat St. Louis and fall to Detroit in the second round.

Of course, these things are all about probabilities and mitigating risk. It’s likely that a dark horse will emerge and unpredictably make its well deep into the playoffs. But that’s difficult to guess correctly, so I went with likely outcomes and I’m hoping for the best. Here are the players I ended up with:

ZETTERBERG
MALKIN
SEMIN
M. GREEN
HAVLAT
CHARA
KRONWALL
RYDER
BURROWS
HOLMSTROM
GUERIN
GETZLAF

UPDATE: Had I known about Rinkology’s fancy bracket creator (thanks to James for the pointer), I would have used that yesterday instead of plain old pen and paper. Here’s a more legible edition (click for a larger version):

My NHL Predictions (Fancy Edition)

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The Diversity of the NHL Draft

June 3rd, 2008, 1 Comment »

Jeffrey recently created this nifty chart, based on Wikipedia data, showing the nationalities of drafted NHL players over the past 40 years or so:

It’s interesting to note the increase in American-born players around 1999. I wonder what happened during that period? Also, I was struck by the declining number of players from Russia. Their development system has gone downhill since the end of the Cold War. Additionally, I gather that Russian players can live pretty high on the hog if they stay home.

Speaking of hockey, how about last night’s game? I’m cheering for the Penguins. There is, of course, a sense of inevitability about the Red Wings’ victory, but it’s nice to see the series go longer. Detroit is such a dominating team–I’m impressed that Pittsburgh has managed to eke out two victories.

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