Predicting the predictions

The dog days of hockey's off-season are nearly over. Soon, the weather will cool, the leaves will start to change color, and training camps will open up around the league.

And that means it's officially prediction season.

Making predictions is tough. In today's parity-stricken NHL, the gap between the best and worst has never been smaller, and nothing ever feels like a sure thing. Simply coming up with an accurate forecast of which teams will be good and which ones will be bad is hard enough.

But of course, that's not really what making predictions is all about. When you sit down to list your picks for the playoffs, the draft lottery and the Stanley Cup, you're not just trying to guess the future. You're also trying to stand out from the crowd by hitting on a few long shots and underdogs along the way. Anyone can predict that the Pittsburgh Penguins will be good or that the Vegas Golden Knights will struggle. You want to aim a little higher.

It all adds up to some interesting psychology. So today, instead of making our own picks – those will come later – let's try something else. Let's predict the predictions, using some basic rules to help us figure out what the coming wave of forecasts might have in common.

Rule 1: Find a team that looks like an underdog but really isn't.

Picking a few playoff teams that missed out last year is just common sense – we typically see a turnover of about a half-dozen teams each season, so just picking the same 16 teams from last year would doom you to failure.

But just picking a handful of non-playoff teams to sneak into the postseason isn’t enough – you have to have at least one of those teams as a real threat to make some noise once they get there. And if you really want to raise some eyebrows, you'll pick a non-playoff team to make it all the way to the final.

Most years, that's a tough pick to make. But not this year. Which is why we can start with a reasonably safe prediction: everyone is going to love the Tampa Bay Lightning.

It's not hard to see why. On paper, the Lightning look like one of the league's better teams, and have for the past few seasons. Nobody saw last year's playoff miss coming, and plenty of us picked them as Cup champs. Then everything fell apart, and the team ended up being the most stunning postseason miss in recent history.

Normally, that might give us all pause, wondering if the Lightning are a team that missed its window and is on the way down. But the laws of hockey predictions say you need to get solidly behind at least one non-playoff team each season, and the Lightning are this year's easiest choice. The Dallas Stars are certainly in play here, too, and will get most of the Western Conference love, and don't sleep on the Los Angeles Kings or Florida Panthers. But the Lightning will be just about everyone's sweetheart comeback story.

>> Read the full post at The Hockey News

Grab Bag: Back when Wayne Gretzky was young (and restless)

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- Henrik Zetterberg gives the game away when it comes to cap-circumventing contracts
- A celebration of the dreaded Horn Of Doom
- An obscure player with one of my favorite career stat lines
- The Kings bring in expert help in the week's three comedy stars
- And move over '89 Devils, a young Wayne Gretzky shows us how the soap opera game is played

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

Which jersey number could produce the best starting lineup in NHL history?

What’s the greatest number in NHL history?

Most fans would call that an easy one. It has to be the No. 9 – that gets you Gordie Howe, Rocket Richard, Bobby Hull, Ted Kennedy and Johnny Bucyk, and we’re not even out of the Original Six era. Mix in modern names like Mike Modano and Paul Kariya, and it’s no contest. Sure, maybe you give some love to No. 4 (Bobby Orr, Jean Beliveau and Red Kelly), perhaps No. 7 (Phil Esposito, Howie Morenz, Ted Lindsay and a bit of Ray Bourque) or more recently No. 91 (Sergei Fedorov, John Tavares, Steven Stamkos). But in hockey, the No. 9 is iconic. It stands alone.

So since the basic version of the question is too easy, let’s up the difficulty level: Which single number in hockey history would give you the best possible starting lineup? In other words, which number would yield the best group of a goaltender, two defencemen and three forwards?

Now things get a little more complicated, because hockey numbers aren’t distributed evenly. For years, goalies wore No. 1, defencemen took most of the rest of the single digits, and everything starting around seven or eight went to the forwards. As time went on, other numbers – 30 and 31 especially – were carved out for goalies, meaning few position players wore them. These days, goalies are getting more creative and there’s more overlap between the positions than there used to be, but still not all that much. And that makes finding the best single lineup a challenge.

For example, now No. 9 doesn’t even get out of the gate – the league has never had a goaltender who wore the number. Teams No. 4, No. 7 and No. 91 are similarly out of luck when it comes to icing a full team. And Team No. 1 has the opposite problem: A ton of legendary goalies, but pretty much nothing else.

A few more ground rules before we get started:

• We’ll be looking for a line of three forwards, but we won’t worry too much about whether they played wing or centre.

• We’ll only be able to go as far back as 1950, since that’s where the hockey-reference.com jersey database that we’ll be relying on cuts off. That actually works out well, since information from before then gets spotty and players (especially goalies) often swapped numbers, so we’ll stick with modern times.

• This one’s important: A player needs to have worn the number in more than one season, and you only get credit for what a player did when he was wearing it. You can’t try to sneak Gordie Howe onto Team No. 17 or Rocket Richard onto Team No. 15 and expect to claim their whole careers.

With that settled, let the debate begin. Here are the best combinations I could come up with, beginning with the honourable mentions.

Team No. 72

Forwards: Patric Hornqvist, Erik Cole, Luke Adam

Defence:Mathieu Schneider, Alex Petrovic

Goalie: Sergei Bobrovsky

This one certainly isn’t a great team, but it’s a decent proof of concept for what we’re going for here. These guys just barely scrape together a roster than can make our multi-season rule — even though Petrovic bailed on No. 72 once he became a regular a few seasons ago. As it is, we’re left with a Vezina-winning goaltender and one all-star defenceman, but not much else.

That’s not the worst way to start a team – build from the back end, and all that – but it would have been nice if Alexei Kovalev had stuck with the number for more than that one season in Pittsburgh. Ah well… here’s hoping Thomas Chabot shows some loyalty once he’s a full-time NHLer this year.

Team No. 41

Forwards: Jason Allison, Brent Gilchrist, Nikolai Kulemin

Defence: Andrej Meszaros, Martin Skoula

Goalie: Craig Anderson

This is one of those numbers that’s morphed over the years from being exclusively for depth skaters to an acceptable goalie’s choice. We went with Anderson in net, but you also could have had Jaroslav Halak or Jocelyn Thibault. And while the five skaters in front of him don’t seem like much to get excited about, they’re probably at least a little bit better than you think – Kulemin had a 30-goal season, and Allison had some legitimately big years in the late ’90s.

Team No. 34

Forwards: Fernando Pisani, Daniel Winnik, Darrin Shannon

Defence: Bryan Berard, Jamie Macoun

Goalie: Miikka Kiprusoff

That’s not a bad back end. Kiprusoff was one of the league’s best goalies for years (and could be backed up by John Vanbiesbrouck), while Berard and Macoun form a nice offence-first/stay-at-home pairing. There are plenty of other workmanlike blueliners to choose from, too, as No. 34 turns out to be a reasonably popular number for defencemen in the Gord Donnelly/Kurt Sauer mold.

Unfortunately, that plugger mentality extends to the forwards, so this group is downright weak up front. If they somehow made it to the playoff round, Pisani might light it up, but that seems like a longshot. So for now, the lack of talent at forward means this group aren’t really contenders. Give it another season, though, and we’ll see.

Team No. 32

Forwards: Dale Hunter, Claude Lemieux, Steve Thomas

Defence: Don Sweeney, Mark Streit

Goalie: Jonathan Quick

Well that certainly ends up being an interesting forward group – watch your back in the playoffs against those first two guys. (And we didn’t even give them Rob Ray or Stu Grimson.)

As for the rest, the blue-line isn’t great, especially since we miss out on Streit’s Islander years. Quick will have his work cut out for him in goal, so here’s hoping he’s as good as Kings fans are always saying he is.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

Grab Bag: Hot dogs and soap operas

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- Leon Draisaitl's new deal is bad. Unless it's good. We're not really sure yet.
- Should the NHL follow USA Hockey's lead on a rule change?
- The week's three comedy stars are really no contest
- An obscure player who could really nurse an injury
- And the 1989 New Jersey Devils show up on General Hospital, and it's every bit as awkward as you'd expect...

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

Five more surprising players who haven't had their numbers retired

Last time around, we covered five somewhat surprising players who've yet to have their numbers retired by the team (or teams) they'd starred with. That led to plenty of debate over who was deserving and who wasn't, and what sort of standards teams should use to determine who gets to see their number go up to the rafters.

But I also heard from plenty of fans who wanted to make the case for players that their own teams hadn't honored yet. For a few of those. I was stunned to find out that a particular franchise hadn't honored a star player years ago. I had to go and double-check that, yes, these guys are still waiting.

So today, let's go back to the well for a look at five more players whose numbers haven't been raised yet, but maybe should have been.

Peter Bondra – Washington Capitals

Bondra was the name that came up most often from readers reacting to the original post, and I'll be honest: I'd always assumed his number had already been honored. After all, surely a member of the 500-goal club who scored almost all of those with Washington would be an obvious choice.

But apparently not, because Bondra is still waiting. He certainly has the qualifications, trailing only Alex Ovechkin in franchise history in both goals and points, while also ranking second in games played. No, he never won a Stanley Cup, but neither has anyone else in Capitals history, so we won't hold that against him.

The Capitals have only retired four numbers in their 43 seasons, and it's a weird mix. There's Mike Gartner, which you'd expect given he had 700 goals in his career (although Bondra has better numbers as a Capital). There's Rod Langway, a Hall of Famer and two-time Norris winner, and that makes sense, too. There's Dale Hunter, a very good player who fans loved.

And then there's Yvon Labre, who you may not even have ever heard of. He was a defenseman who played seven seasons for the Capitals back in the bad old days when the team was awful, including two as team captain. By all accounts he's a great guy in the community and he's remained with the team in various roles over the years, but in hindsight the decision to retire his #7 back in 1981 seems like an odd one.

Clearly, the bar here has to be a little higher than just being better than Yvon Labre, but the Capitals' recent reluctance – they haven't honored anyone at all since 2008 – seems like an over-correction. There's a good case to be made for Olaf Kolzig, too, but Bondra's been waiting for years and seems like the guy who should be first in line.

>> Read the full post at The Hockey News