The right and mostly wrong (but maybe right?) of my Oddly Specific Predictions

Every year, just as the regular season is set to begin, I make Oddly Specific predictions for each NHL team. It’s one of my very favorite columns to write each year.

And then in the spring, I have to see if I actually got any right. That’s today’s column, and it is not one of my favorites.

But we have to do it because accountability matters, so here we go. If you’re new to the Oddly Specific prediction game, it’s exactly what it sounds like: A prediction for each team that gets a little too detailed. It’s not enough to say a team will have more points; we need an exact total. Don’t tell us something will happen; give us the specific game. Anyone can predict an Alexander Ovechkin goal; let’s see you plant the flag for Joel Hanley.

That last one, of course, is maybe our most memorable hit – in 2022, I didn’t just predict that defensive defenseman Hanley would finally score his first regular season goal, but also gave you the exact game it happened in. It was pretty amazing. I’ve been chasing that high ever since.

I’ll save you the suspense: This year’s predictions, which you can go back and read here, don’t have any Hanley-level miracle calls. At least… not yet. But we’ll get to that.

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Win our prediction contest by getting this one easy question right (you won't)

The NHL playoffs are back, or will be in a few days. And that means its time for the annual playoff prediction contest, an incredibly simple single-question test that you will almost certainly fail.

We tried this last year, and readers seemed to enjoy it. A few of you even did reasonably well. But not many, and that was in a year where the postseason didn’t serve up many surprises. Let’s see how things go this time around.

All you need to do is leave a comment below, with your answer to our single catch-all question.

 

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NHL weekend rankings: A top 16, oddly specific predictions and Gold Plan standings

Welcome to the last Weekend Rankings of the 2024-25 season.

Longtime readers know what that means: You’re getting a Top 16 instead of a Top 5, with every playoff team ranked. We’ll also check in on what the Gold Plan standings would be looking like in the Bottom 5, and we’ll even make a few oddly specific predictions.

When the schedule first came out, I was a little bit nervous about having the season end on a Thursday, since that meant the last rankings would come out when each team still had a game or two left. What if there was a furious race down to the wire, and I couldn’t do a Top 16 because there were 20 or more teams still battling it out for the final spots?

Luckily, the NHL heard my concerns and responded accordingly, delivering an absolute dud of a late-season race in which we basically already know all the playoff teams and most of the matchups. Yay?

We’ll get to the rankings in a bit. But first, let’s make five oddly specific predictions...

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Oddly specific NHL predictions for all 32 teams’ 2024-25 seasons

Every year, I write two annual prediction columns. In one, I try to predict where each team in the league will finish where, and which ones are legitimate Cup contenders.

That column ran last week, and I don’t like it.

Not this year’s version in particular. I just don’t like making those basic meat-and-potato type of calls, because the risk/reward just doesn’t work for me. If I’m right, big deal – oh wow, you had Edmonton as Cup contenders, way to go out on a limb. And of course, if I’m wrong about anyone (which I will be), I have to hear about it from the fan base all year long. Where’s the fun in that?

Then you have the second prediction column. This one. The fun one.

This is the annual column where I get way too specific on my predictions for each team. It’s not enough to think something might happen; I’ll give you an exact date. Oh, some player is going to post nice numbers; good for them, but what specific numbers will those be? Anyone can predict the basic stats; how about the weird ones you’re not even thinking of?

And the best part of all: All of these predictions are so oddly specific that there’s no chance any of them will be right. Unless they are, in which case you will never hear the end of it.

I can’t lose. So let’s dive in, as we drill down on one call for every team.

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It's the return of the NHL prediction contest that’s so easy it’s almost impossible

The NHL season has technically arrived, with a European appetizer being served up today between the Devils and Sabres. But the real debut comes next week, with the other 30 teams seeing their first action beginning on Tuesday. That’s when we’ll finally start to find out how teams will look in games that matter, after weeks of the so-called experts telling us what to expect.

But first: it’s your turn.

After all, if me and all my colleagues are going to be forced to embarrass ourselves with bad predictions, then it’s only fair that you get your chance too. And around these parts, that means an entry in the world’s easiest prediction contest.

The concept is simple. I’ll give you ten questions that should be super easy to answer. You decide how confident you’re feeling, and how many answers you want to give. Each right answer means more points, but each wrong one means you take a zero. But you won’t have to worry about that, because again, the questions are super easy.

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From Stanley Cup contenders to bottom feeders: Predicting the 2024-25 season

Fun fact: In the NHL, the “pre” in preseason stands for predictions. We all have to make them, including you – the reader prediction contest is coming later this week, so be ready. For now, it’s my turn to lay my cards on the table, with my annual division-based attempt to dice up the league.

The rules, as always: I get four divisions, with exactly eight teams each. We’ll have the bottom-feeders, the middle-of-the-pack, the legitimate Stanley Cup contenders, and then the teams I just have no idea about. Because I enjoy making my own life difficult, that eight teams per division rule is mandatory. (Insert your own joke here about the “no clue” division having all 32 teams in it otherwise.)

We’ll start form the bottom and work our way up…

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NHL 2023-24 prediction contest results (or how the Devils ruined everything)

July 1 has come and gone and we’re officially into a new year of the NHL calendar, which means it’s pencils down on the 2023-24 prediction contest. Let’s see how you did.

First, the background for any newcomers out there. This was year four of the contest, in which you answer 10 seemingly simple questions about the upcoming season with as much or as little confidence as you can muster. More answers means more points, but even one wrong answer means a zero for the question, so in theory there’s a balance to be found.

This year’s contest had a little over 2,000 entries. You can find the original contest post here. We went through those initial entries to figure out what they told us about the coming season. And we had a midseason check-in to see how you were doing.

As always, while the idea here is to get the highest possible score and win, the real fun is in looking back at the entries and seeing how smart (or dumb) the wisdom of the crowd really was. With that in mind, let’s look at each of the questions, and just how “simple” they turned out to be.

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Revisiting the good, bad and awful from my oddly specific 2023-24 NHL predictions

Every year, right before the season starts, I get to write one of my favorite columns of the year: My oddly specific predictions. That’s the piece where I try to predict what will happen with alarming and frankly unnecessary specificity. I lay out one call for every team, some of you take notes and others just laugh at me, and a good time is had by all.

Do I ever get any right? Well, about that…

Somewhat surprisingly, I’ve had a few hits over the years. Not a ton, but at least enough that I can still show my face at the end of the year. Back in 2021, I called a season-opening two-goal game for a guy coming off a season where he’d had only one goal all year. In last year’s predictions, I told you the specific game that would see the Kings get their only misconduct of the year. And nothing will ever top my 2022 column, in which I predicted that a guy with zero career regular season goals would finally get his very first, then told you the exact game he’d do it in.

Those were all cool. Let’s not talk about the roughly 100 other predictions from those years.

As always, I’ll hold myself accountable by going through each and every prediction I made in this year’s column, which you can go back and read here. Will it be pretty? No. But will it be an embarrassing oh-fer? Only one way to find out…

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This playoff prediction contest has only one question, which you will get wrong

Back in 2021, I launched an NHL prediction contest in an attempt to prove a point, and that point was that none of us know anything about this dumb league. Four seasons in, it's fair to say you guys aren’t exactly making me eat my words.

This year, I’m adding a playoff version of the contest, but with a twist: There’s only one question.

That’s it. One question, that you’ll get right or wrong, with no complicated scoring to speak of. But I still think you’ll do terrible, because none of us know anything about the NHL, and once the playoffs start, we know even less.

Or maybe not. Maybe you’ve cracked the code, and you can prove me wrong. Let's find out.

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Offering up an oddly specific prediction for all 32 NHL teams this year

This is my favorite prediction column to write each year.

Like most hockey writers, I produce more than my share of predictions. There’s my annual leaguewide look, which also went live today and can be found here. I was part of The Athletic’s staff-wide award picks. I’ve been making picks on podcasts, and radio hits, and probably in my sleep. It’s part of the lead up to opening night, and it’s fun.

But once a year, I let myself go overboard by making predictions for each team that are way too specific. Anyone can predict that a player will hit a milestone or break a record; I want to also give you the exact date it will happen. Some player is going to be in the running for an award? Not good enough, you deserve to know exactly where they’ll finish. Along the way, we also dig up a few weird odds and ends from the stat book. But the key is that in these parts, we don’t use words like “around” or “approximately” or “close enough”.

We also don’t use words like “correct” very often, but that’s half the appeal. And when I do nail one of these predictions – like picking the exact game in which Joel Hanley would score his first regular season goal, or the exact night that the Kings would take their only misconduct penalty of the season – then it goes without saying that I will never shut up about it.

The offseason lasted forever and real hockey is just hours away. Let’s get oddly specific.

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From Stanley Cup contenders to bottom feeders: Predicting the NHL season

Opening night is almost here. Are you sick of predictions yet? Too bad, here comes another batch, as I’ve put together my annual attempt to sort the NHL into four divisions.

The rules, as always: I get just those four divisions, each with exactly eight teams. We’ll have the bottom-feeders, the middle-of-the-pack, the legitimate contenders, and then the teams where I just have no idea. That last one should honestly just have every team in it, but let’s not dwell on that.

Four divisions, starting with the dregs and working our way up. Will I get them all right? No. But will I nail at least a few? Not necessarily, to be honest. Let’s do this.

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Make your picks for the prediction contest that's so easy it's almost impossible

It’s easy to look like a genius when you predict the NHL season. Just focus on the obvious, lay out everything that you know is going to happen, and feel confident in your unshakeable wisdom. And then – and this is the important part – don’t leave a public record anywhere, so nobody can look back in a few months and see how wrong you actually were.

That’s where this contest comes in. A few years ago, I got tired of everyone telling me how predictable the NHL was. Something would happen that I thought was unexpected, like the Golden Knights being good in year one, or the Sharks collapsing, or Barry Trtoz getting the Islanders into the playoffs. I’d express my surprise, and I’d inevitably hear from all sorts of fans who’d scoff. It was obvious all along, they’d tell me. And everyone with half a brain knew it.

OK, I finally said – prove it. And after a little bit of tinkering, my annual prediction contest was born. The premise was simple: Since the league is so easy to predict, I’d ask you some of the most basic questions imaginable. Nothing fancy or especially complicated. Just which teams would be good or bad, which coaches and GMs were on safe ground, and which players would be the stars of the season. If the prediction business was as easy as everyone said, you guys would crush it.

Gentle readers, you have not crushed it.

In three years, the contest has grown from 800 entries to 1,600 to last year’s 2,1000. And nobody has come close to an especially great score. Only a small handful have even managed a passing grade. You can check in on last year’s results here, when it turned out that you didn’t believe in the Kraken, you did believe in Darryl Sutter, and literally nobody thought old man Erik Karlsson was a Norris candidate. Like I said, not so simple… at least when someone is keeping track.

This year, we’ve got all the old classic questions returning, plus a brand new one that shines a spotlight on the middle-of-the-pack. And yes, the dreaded bonus question is back too. As always, the winner gets a signed copy of my book, plus the (infinitely more valuable) bragging rights that you actually called your shots.

Good luck. History says you’re going to need it.

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Revisiting the right, wrong and very wrong of my oddly specific NHL predictions

One of my favorite posts to write every year is my Oddly Specific Predictions for the coming season. Shortly before opening night, I'll go through each team and make one prediction that’s way too detailed. Anyone can guess that something might happen; I’ll try to tell you where and when and exactly how. It’s become an annual tradition, and it’s all in good fun.

One of my least favorite posts to write is this one, where I see how those predictions actually did. Let’s just say it’s not pretty.

That’s the whole point, of course, and some years are better than others. Last year featured probably the most unlikely hit that I’ll ever have, as I not only predicted that 30-year-old defensive defenseman Joel Hanley would score his first-ever regular season goal, but nailed the exact game he would do it in.

I probably should have dropped the mic and quit while I was ahead, but that’s not how the prediction game works. I made a new slate of calls for the 2022-23 season, which you can find here. And now it’s time to take my medicine and see how they hold up.

As always, we’ll divide the list into various categories that highlight the ones I got wrong, the ones I got embarrassingly wrong, and the ones I got right. Will there be anything at all in that last group? Miracles happen, so let’s find out how I did.

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Prediction contest update: You're not doing great, but it could be worse

We’ve hit the midway mark of the season, which means this as good a time as any to check in our prediction contest. How’s everybody doing? The answer: Not great! But alos, not terrible… so far.

If you’ve been missing out on the fun, the prediction contest is annual exercise that offers up a list of seemingly easy questions. Who’ll make the playoffs, who won’t get fired, who’ll be in the Hart race, that sort of thing. You can offer up to five answers, with more points up for grabs the further oyu go, but the catch is that you take a zero on the question if you get even one wrong.

The contest debuted for the 2020-21 season, and you all did poorly. Then came last year’s version, and it was carnage. Out of 1,583 entries, only one even managed to get a 50% grade. This thing is tougher than it looks. Which, of course, is the whole point.

This year’s contest can be found here; a summary of the over 2,100 entries is here. Midway through the season, how’s it going? Let’s find out.

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#1. Name up to five teams that will make the playoffs.

By this time last year, a majority of you were in big trouble with the Islanders, and almost everyone was at least a little nervous over the Golden Knights. Neither team made it, meaning the failure rate on the question ended up close to 99%.

It could be even worse this year.

That’s because almost every single entry includes the Avalanche, who are currently just barely holding down a wildcard spot by points percentage. That’s maybe not quite as scary as it seems, since they’ve had a ton of injuries to deal with. Readers of the weekly rankings know that I’m not especially worried about Colorado, and I’d bet that not many of us actually think they’re in real danger of missing the postseason. Then again, we all felt the same way about the Golden Knights last year, right up until the door slammed shut. Weird stuff happens.

Beyond the Avs, over 900 of you had the Flames and/or the Oilers, and there may not be room for both. Florida needs a second-half miracle, and if they don’t get it they’ll take out over 500 entries. And condolences to the one entry that picked the Ducks, it's not looking great for you.

#2. Name up to five teams that will not make the playoffs.

This one’s going a little bit better, as the Connor Bedard tank sweepstakes have mostly led to all the expected bottom-dwellers being as bad as advertised. Your top five answers – Arizona, Chicago, Montreal, Philadelphia and San Jose – all look safe. We do hit a snag on the next most common response, as over 650 of you had Seattle missing out. Another 500 listed Buffalo, who could still make it interesting.

If you avoided those two danger picks, you should be OK unless you’re one of the 50 or so who had New Jersey or Winnipeg. Otherwise, there are points in play here.

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What can we learn when 2,100 hockey fans try to predict the future?

Every year, right before the season starts, I run a prediction contest. There’s a list of simple questions, and you give me your easy answers, and at the end we realize that we’re all dumb. It’s fun, and this year there were 2,109 entries. If you missed it, you can read about how the contest works here.

This post isn’t about the actual contest. It’s too soon to know much about how that will play out, and we’ll have plenty of time to check in on how everyone is doing down the road. But it occurred to me that I’ve got something interesting here: A detailed survey of hockey fans with a pretty decent sample size, all pointing to what we actually think is going to happen this year.

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Oddly specific 2022-23 predictions for all 32 teams

One of the things we’ve learned during hockey’s analytics revolution is that shooting percentage can be deceiving. When a player has a season in which the shots are going in at a higher rate than his established career number, we should be suspicious that the year will turn out to be a fluke, or at least an outlier, and not a new long-term norm. In other words, just because somebody gets lucky one year doesn’t mean we should expect them to repeat that in the future.

This is my way of managing expectations for this year’s oddly specific predictions.

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The prediction contest returns, with a new question and an even tougher bonus

Two years ago, I introduce what I thought would be a fun prediction contest with a simple concept: I ask you some easy questions about the upcoming season, you give me the easy answers, and then we sit back and realize that the prediction business isn’t all that easy after all. It ended up being a lot of fun, with roughly 800 entries and a close race down to the wire.

Last year, we doubled up to nearly 1,600 entries, added a new all-or-nothing bonus question, and saw even more chaos thanks to curveballs from Joe Sakic, Joel Quenneville, Barry Trotz and an injured Nathan MacKinnon, among others. Many of you followed the results all season long. Many more were basically eliminated by November.

It goes without saying that we’re doing this again this year, with essentially the same set of rules, plus a new question and a tweak to the bonus. As always, read the rules carefully and please follow the formatting guidelines. Good luck, and remember, this should be easy because the NHL is super predictable.

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Predicting the NHL season, from the bottom-feeders to the true contenders

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the entire 2022-23 season. Don’t read any further if you want to be surprised.

That didn’t sound convincing, but I’m trying to manifest here, so stay with me. This is my annual attempt to sort the NHL into four divisions, based on how I’m expecting them to do this year. We’ll have the contenders, the middle-of-the-pack, and the basement dwellers. And as always, we’ll also have the division made up of teams I can’t figure out. Let’s just sat that’s the toughest one to narrow down.

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The prediction contest results are in, and wow you all did terrible

OK, that was more like it.

Last year’s debut of the super-easy prediction contest was a lot of fun. I’d give you a handful of “simple” questions, you gave me the obvious answers, and every right answer would score you points – but only if you didn’t get any wrong. That was the twist that made it challenging, and it was, as only a single entry out of 800 was perfect (and that one didn’t win). The other 799 of you had at least one of your oh-so-obvious predictions turn out to be wrong. Most of you had lots. And of course, that was the whole point.

But I’ll be honest – last year’s contest was tough, but it didn’t turn out to be quite as tough as I’d hoped. When I came up with the idea, I figured that a typical NHL season has so many unexpected twists and turns that we’d see zeroes everywhere. I wanted to prove a point about how all the obvious stuff is only obvious in hindsight, and when you force people to spell it out in advance they don’t look as smart as they think they are.

In other words, I didn’t want you guys to struggle – I wanted to see you get wiped out. And it didn’t really happen, because the 2020-21 playoff and non-playoff teams went pretty much according to plan, there weren’t any stunning coach or GM changes, and the biggest MVP favorites all lived up to expectations. Alexis Lafreniere took down most of you on the Calder question, and the goalies were tough, but it was possible to navigate last year’s entry reasonably well. It was bad. Just not that bad.

Which brings us to this year.

With an expanded field of almost 1,600 entires, this was more like the contest that I’d had in mind, because the preseason wisdom of the crowds turned out to be filled with bad assumptions. The Golden Knights were playoff locks. So were the Islanders. The Kings were still a few years away. Cole Caufield would run away with the Calder. Nathan MacKinnon was a lock to contend for the Hart. And surely, if we could count on anything at all, it was that coaches like Joel Quenneville, Bruce Cassidy and Barry Trotz couldn’t possibly be fired.

Yeah, none of that turned out to be true. And then the best GM in the league, one with universal respect and completely untouchable job security, got promoted upstairs with days left in the contest.

You guys are so screwed.

Mix in the new bonus question, which was designed to implode your entry no matter what you did anywhere else, and this year’s winner was really going to need to earn it. So who pulled it off? Let’s find out.

(A monster thank you to readers Joe and Mike, both of whom created automated tools I could use to track the results rather than doing it all by hand like last year.)

To recap the rules of this year’s contest, there were nine standard questions and one bonus that we’ll get to at the end. For the standard questions, entrants had the option of giving anywhere from one to five answers to each and would receive one point for the first correct answer, two for the second (for a total of three), all the way up to five points for the fifth answer (for a maximum of 15 points for a 5-for-5 answer). But even one wrong answer hit you with a zero for that question, so you had to decide how far you wanted to push. Play it safe and bank a few easy points, or go for more but add to your risk with each new answer? It was up to you.

For the first two questions, you simply had to know which teams would and wouldn’t make the playoffs.

1. Name up to five teams that will make the playoffs this year.

And right off the bat, it’s carnage. Of the 1,583 entries, almost 1,500 listed the Golden Knights as a sure thing to make the playoffs. They weren’t dumb, as just about every preseason prediction agreed that the Knights were an absolute lock in the Pacific. With no other truly good teams in the division, a stacked lineup on paper, and rumors of a Jack Eichel trade on the way, the Knights were an absolute sure-thing, right up until they weren’t.

To make matters worse, about 900 of you also had the Islanders listed, including most of the 100 entries or so that managed to dodge the Golden Knights. In all, only 17 entries got points on question one, with 13 getting the max 15 points and four more going conservative and settling for less.

We’re one question in, and we’re already looking at a 99% failure rate. Oh, and this might not even have been the hardest question.

2. Name up to five teams that will not make the playoffs this year.
After a brutal start, the group did significantly better here. The Kings were a surprise, and they took out about 50 entries, as did the Predators. But for the most part, this was a safe question, with over 1,400 of you banking some points and about 1,300 getting the max 15.

For a while, it looked like it wouldn’t turn out that way. The Ducks spent the first half of the season in the playoff mix, even holding down top spot in the Pacific for a while, and they were aming a lot of you nervous when we did our midseason check-in before fading down the stretch. They showed up on almost 1,200 entries, so if they’d made it then they’d have done some serious damage. But they didn’t, so most of you were fine.

By the way, because they represented the extremes of the contest, the first two questions turned out not to matter all that much. At this point, there’s an overwhelming chance that your entry was sitting at 15 points on the nose, having whiffed on the first question and aced the second. It would be how you could navigate the rest of the way that would determine your chances.

3. Name up to five coaches who will not be fired or otherwise leave their job before the first day of 2022 free agency, NOT including any coach who was hired to their current job after Oct. 1, 2020.

Oh no.

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The right and (mostly) wrong from my oddly specific predictions

One of my favorite things to do each year before the season starts is to make a whole bunch of predictions that are almost definitely going to be wrong.

Most predictions are, of course, especially when they come from sportswriters. We’re bad at this, myself very much included. And I figure that if that’s going to be the case, and I’m probably going to be wrong anyway, I should embrace it and be willing to be really wrong.

I call them my oddly specific predictions, and I make one for each team. Most of them end up being laughably wrong, but even a broken clock finds a nut sometimes. Last season was a good batch, with three predictions that turned out right, including one involving out old friend Jacob Markstrom, who we can always count on when it comes to the prediction game. Or can we? We’ll get to that.

What about this year? As always, you can’t make predictions at the start of the season if you don’t take your medicine at the end. So let’s go through all 32 of my picks from this year’s column, and see how I did.

Tier 1: Not just wrong but extra wrong

You would think that the worst a prediction could be would be just plain wrong, but no. Sometimes a prediction misses so badly that it eats its way through to other side and becomes weirdly impressive.

Winnipeg Jets: I went all-in on the Jets as legitimate Cup contenders, predicting they’d finish fifth overall. They didn’t even finish in the top five of their own division.

Arizona Coyotes: I predicted that since Phil Kessel was obviously getting traded, his new team would win the Stanley Cup. Turns out, the Coyotes didn’t even move him at all.

Calgary Flames: My years of being able to manifest Jacob Markstrom shutouts came to an end, after I predicted he’d get one on December 23 against the Kraken. He didn’t. Also, he didn’t play that night. Also, none of his teammates did either because the game didn’t happen. (It was eventually rescheduled for February 19, when Markstrom stopped 22 of 23 shots in a 3-1 win, so I can’t even claim this one on a technicality.)

Wait, does this mean my Markstrom magic, the one sure thing I’ve been able to count on when it came to predictions over the years, is finally over? Hold that thought for a bit…

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