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Puckerings 2, Hockey News 0
Copyright Iain Fyffe, 2004
Published May 29, 2004

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Before the 2002/03 season, I made public my NHL predictions here at HockeyZonePlus, with the intent of comparing my performance to that of the self-proclaimed “Bible of Hockey”, The Hockey News (THN). As you may recall, my predictions turned out to be marginally better than theirs. Using correlation coefficients between the actual standings and the predicted standings (where the coefficient is between –1 and 1, and the higher the number, the better the match), the 2002/03 results were:

2002/03 Prediction Results

Predictor	Overall	East Conf	West Conf
Me	0.66	0.75	0.58
THN	0.62	0.66	0.58
2001/02 results	0.46	0.54	0.38

We both did better than simply using the previous year’s standings, but my greater accuracy in the Eastern Conference carried the day. Buoyed by this success, I made my predictions again for the 2003/04 season, to see if my victory was more fluke than skill.

My predictions are based solely on statistical and other objective analysis, while THN tends to make remarks like “they got tougher”. So how did we do?

2003/04 Prediction Results

Predictor	Overall	East Conf	West Conf
Me	0.66	0.73	0.59
THN	0.57	0.67	0.47
2002/03 results	0.54	0.66	0.43

While my results were eerily similar to last year’s, THN lost ground, and once again my predictions were more accurate. In fact, THN barely beat the 2002/03 standings in terms of predictive value. The Western Conference was again enigmatic, being the much harder conference to predict.

It might be fun to look at the biggest misses in these predictions:

	THN has San Jose 14th in the West; they finished 2nd. I did better, putting them at 10th. I remarked when I first made the predictions that the Sharks were not as bad as their 2002/03 standings suggested. But their young players really came on this year, and that has a great season.
	I had Calgary 15th in the West; they finished 6th. THN did better, putting them 12th. Of course, this is due almost entirely to Miikka Kiprusoff, and acquisition which neither I not THN could have known about before the season started. So you can’t hold this one against us.

I’m not going to quit while I’m ahead. I think I’ll make this an annual tradition, comparing my modest predictions to those of a hockey media giant. May the best analyst win.

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