The 2025-26 prediction contest results are in, and Kris Knoblauch ruined everything

Now that we're a few days into July, it’s time to answer two equally important questions: Which cap-flush teams handed out the most outrageously expensive contracts to mid-level players, and how’d everyone do in the annual prediction contest?

If you’re new to all of this, let’s get you caught up. Every year, right before the season starts, we run a reader contest in which you’re invited to make predictions about what will and won’t happen in the coming season. The questions are simple, but this league sure isn’t, and most years everyone does terribly. We track the contest all year long, and at the end we all point and laugh at each other for every thinking we knew anything.

That day has come, with July 1 representing the end of the league year and the official finish line for the contest. Pencils down, everyone, it’s time to turn in your papers.

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An NHL playoff contest update, where 850 entered and just two are left standing

Two months ago, we started with a full field of championship hopefuls. Some knew they were facing long odds, but were willing to dream big dreams. Others were bathed in the soothing safety of favorite status. But they all had one thing in common: The abiding belief that this could be their year.

Then the playoffs started, and it all went to hell.

I’m referring, of course, to our annual playoff contest, in which I ask one simple question and almost all of you get it wrong. It launched a few days before the playoffs started, and over 850 of you entered.

How many of those entries are still alive and in the running for the title? Um… two.

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Enter the world's easiest NHL playoff prediction contest, with just one question

It’s playoff time, almost. The time of year when the best of the best rise to the top and prove that they have what it takes to win it all. The rest? They lose, sometimes dramatically and sometimes meekly, but either way they end up wondering what might have been.

I’m referring to you guys.

Yes, it’s time for our annual playoff contest, in which I ask you one simple question, and you send in your one-line answer. Then we wait. Then almost all of you get it wrong. Then I make fun of you.

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We were right doubt to the Jets, and other midseason lessons from the prediction contest

One of my favorite posts of every year is the annual prediction contest, in which I give you ten simple questions about how the upcoming season will go, and you get them wrong.

I love that for us, for two reasons. First, it helps me feel better about all of my own bad predictions. (The New Jersey Devils: maybe not elite Cup contenders after all.) But more importantly, it’s a way to remind us all about just how unpredictable the NHL has become. It’s easy to look back at any given season after its over and shrug about how nothing was all that surprising. That gets a little tougher when you have over a thousand fans putting their predictions on the public record.

Will this season be another collective swing-and-miss? Probably, although we’re not there yet. But now that we’ve crossed the halfway point of the season, it feels like a good time to check in and see how we’re doing.

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William Nylander was a fluke and the Jets are weird: Prediction contest lessons

We run a prediction contest for our readers right before every regular season, and it results in two of my favorite posts of the year.

My very favorite comes at the end of the season, where I reveal the final results and laugh at you for being wrong. (This is not to be confused with my weekly power rankings, which run all season long and result in you laughing at me for being wrong.) But my second favorite is this one, where we dig into your answers and try to see what they tell us about what the hockey world’s smartest fans – i.e. my readers – are thinking about the coming season.

If you missed the contest post, you can find it here. The contest involves 10 simple questions, covering everything from team success to coaching and front office hot seats to individual awards. This year, we also worked in an Olympic question. And of course, there’s the all-or-nothing bonus questions, which gives you the chance to risk your entire entry for the extra points that might push your entry into the winner's circle.

We had well over 1,100 entries this year. This isn’t a poll with a random sample size, of course, and contest strategy could in theory result in some incentives for weird picks. But we can still learn some interesting things from who was named in your entries, and who wasn't. let’s dive in.

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Enter the NHL prediction contest that’s so easy it’s completely impossible

Its time.

With the start of the NHL season just a few days away, you’ve read all the previews and predictions. So, so many predictions, by so many so-called experts, none of whom have any idea what they’re talking about.

Now it’s your turn to be wrong.

Yes, it’s prediction contest time, our annual reminder that an NHL season is basically impossible to project. I give you a series of very easy questions. You decide how confident you want to be, and what the optimal strategy looks like. Then we sit back, enjoy the season, and watch it all fall apart.

No big changes to the rules or format this year, although we’ve swapped out one of the traditional questions. Here’s how this works:

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NHL 2024-25 prediction contest results, where playing it safe (finally) paid off

July 1 has come and gone, marking one of the most important dates on the entire NHL calendar.

Free agency? Extension? The start of the new league year? Yeah, I guess that stuff matters a bit. But I’m talking about the truly big stuff: The end of the annual prediction contest.

Yes, with the first day of free agency over with, we can officially close the book on the 2024-25 contest. It was the fourth time we’ve run this thing, and scores have been increasing every year. In theory, you guys are getting better at this. In reality… well, we’ll get to that.

As usual, the gimmick here is that the questions are easy, but you take a zero if you offer even one wrong answer, so the risk-reward can get tricky. If you missed out on the contest, or could use a refresher on how it all works, you can find the original post here. An initial summary came a week later, in which we learned that nobody believed in Sam Reinhart. Correctly, as it turns out. I’m sure he’ll be crushed once he and the rest of his teammates sober up. If they ever do.

The good news is that unlike last year, there was no tie at the top this time. There was one winner. Was it you? Maybe! (No.) Let’s go through the questions and see how this played out.

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The Lightning are a lock to go deep, and other lessons from the prediction contest

And then there were two. And soon, just one winner.

No, this isn’t a Stanley Cup preview post that accidentally ran a few days early. It’s an update on the annual playoff prediction contest, which is already over for almost all of you. We’ll get to that in a bit.

But first, a refresher. This is the contest that seems simple, because it’s only one question: Name as many or as few playoff teams as you’d like based on how many games they’ll win, in order from most to least. That’s it. We even give you the benefit of the doubt on ties, because we want you to succeed. But you don’t. Did I mention that you’re not good at this? Because you’re not.

You can find this year’s contest post here, and if you entered, you can find your answer by heading to the comment section of that post and using the dropdown to select “my comments”. But you probably don’t want to do that, because spoiler alert, there’s a roughly 99.8% chance that you’re out of the running.

Let’s get into what happened, and why you’re bad at this.

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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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Nobody believes in Sam Reinhart, and other lessons from the prediction contest

Every year, right before the season starts, I run a prediction contest for readers. I come up with ten simple questions about what’s about to happen – which teams will and won’t make the playoffs, which jobs are safe, which players will have good seasons, that sort of thing. You send in your answers, and we throw it all into a big database and wait.

It’s one of my favorite posts of the year, for two reasons. The first is that you guys are inevitably terrible at predicting the season, and I get to make fun of you all year for it while feeling better about my own equally terrible predictions. That’s the main reason.

But there’s a bonus to this sort of thing, in that it also functions as a stealth survey of where fans are at heading into a season. I don’t know too many places where you can get this sort of volume of hockey fan opinions. It’s not a truly unbiased poll, because it’s self-selected instead of random and I think we can all agree that my readers are smarter than everyone else’s. But it’s pretty close, and it can be interesting to dig into the data and see what the wider hockey world seems to be thinking.

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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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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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The playoff prediction contest was supposed to be impossible. Then things got weird

Two months ago, I launched a new prediction contest. After a few years of running the regular season contest and watching you all fail miserably, I figured we could double our fun by adding a playoff edition.

It was a simple contest, with just one question: List as many or as few playoff teams as you’d like, in order of how many games they'd win during the postseason, from most to fewest. And I taunted you with the promise that you’d still get it wrong.

And then, a funny thing happened.

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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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We are not smart, and other midseason lessons from the prediction contest

Every year, right before opening night, I run a prediction contest for the upcoming NHL season. And two things always end up being true: The questions seems very easy at the time, and everyone does terrible.

That “everyone” includes me, by the way – I’m not any better at this than all of you are. The lesson is that none of us know anything. Or maybe it’s that the NHL product is more unpredictable than any of us give it credit for, throwing us constant twists and turns and unexpected swerves to keep us guessing all year long. And also, none of us know anything.

Today, we’re going to do the annual midseason check-in and see how we’re all doing. Spoiler: Not great!

If you’d like a refresher, you can find the original 2023-24 contest post here, along with the roughly 2,000 entries in the comment section. A summary of the consensus, in which nobody understood the Bruins, followed here. But that was all months ago, and a lot has happened since, so let’s see where we’re at.

This year’s contest featured 10 standard questions, plus the dreaded all-or-nothing bonus. If you like feeling smart, this is your last chance to look away.

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Nobody understands the Bruins (and other lessons from your preseason predictions)

Every now and then, somebody will ask me why I take the time to set up the annual prediction contest. Why bother, when it takes so much work to scrape all the data from our (occasionally uncooperative) comment section, massage it into some kind of working shape, and then monitor the whole thing over the course of a full season?

The first answer is that I just like seeing how wrong you all are, and how sad that makes you feel.

But the second answer is that there’s a bonus to the contest, from my perspective: By getting a few thousand readers to put their pre-season predictions in writing, I end up with a treasure trove of data on what fans are thinking. I like to think that The Athletic’s readers are reasonably bright and well-informed, and while a prediction game isn’t a random sampling, it’s still a useful way to take the pulse of the hockey world.

So today, let’s set aside the contest aspect – we’ll check in on that later in the year – and just focus on what you told me about what you do and don’t believe heading into the 2023-24 season.

This is all based on an early pass on the data, which hasn’t been cleaned up yet. (Special thanks to contest wrangler Mike, who was able to get the initial pass done in record time.) We’ll focus on broad trends rather than specific numbers, but there’s still plenty to dig into.

Such as…

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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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The 2022-23 predicion contest results (or, how Auston Matthews ruined everything)

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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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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