Every year, right before the season starts, one of my favorite things to do is run a simple contest. Simple, in the sense that it’s not very complicated. But more importantly, simple as in easy. All you have to do is answer the most obvious set of questions about the coming NHL season. Which teams are locks for the playoffs, which coaches are definitely safe, which goalies will be their team’s undisputed starter, that sort of thing. Dead simple.
You guys are terrible at it.
That’s the beauty of it. While the questions always seem easy in hindsight, they’re a little tougher when you have to lock your answers in before the season starts.
We first ran the contest two years ago, and you did poorly. Last year we upped the difficulty just a bit, and you did even worse. And that brings us to this year.
The good news is that for the second straight year, we shattered the record for entries. This seasons’ contest had over 2,100 entries. Surely at least a few of you would knock it out of the park.
Well, let’s see about that. If you’re new to this, the idea behind the contest is that there are ten regular questions and one optional bonus. For each of the first ten, I ask you a basic question and you give me anywhere from one to five answers. Each answer scores points on a scale that increase with the more answers you give, so there’s an incentive to go big. But even one wrong answer wipes out all the points for a question, so you have to get strategic. Sure, it seems easy, but how confident are you? Will you play it safe with the true sure things, or risk it all to squeeze in one more answer?
That’s where it gets tricky. Let’s see how you all did this year.
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