Please visit Puckerings for more hockey stuff by me   

It’s hard to believe that 23.7% of the NHL schedule is already behind us (as of November 22).  I thought this would be a good time to post the first of my promised updates on my 2002/03 predictions, and compare them to how The Hockey News is doing so far this year.

To evaluate the predictions, I will use the coefficients of correlation between the predicted conference rankings and the actual conference rankings (based on projected points to account for differences in games played), as at November 22.  Really good predictions will have high positive correlation coefficients, say around 0.70 or higher.  So without further ado, here we are:

So we see the Western Conference has really been turned on its head so far this year.  Minnesota is outperforming expectations, as is Columbus (though to be fair, the predictions above were made before the Cassels deal).  And Colorado’s performance is disappointing.  In the East, Tampa is a big surprise (pegged at 12^th of 13^th by all predictors), as is Toronto, but in the other direction.