Five Thirty Eight - Now with NHL predictions! - Update: 20 games
I don't wade into the Fire on Ice forum too much, so apologies if this has already been posted. I really enjoy following Five Thirty Eight for their sports predictions for MLB and NFL, but they never had one for NHL until this year:
For those following the offseason, the projection for the Flames is pretty much expected. Their ELO rating is 1502, which is basically as "average" as you can get. They are forecast to get 91 points and have a 54% chance of making the playoffs. Hard to argue with much of that in my opinion.
These will be updated as the season goes on. It's basically a more powerful (and likely more accurate) version of SportsClubStats, which I haven't used in a few years. I enjoying watching it for other sports, so I figured others might like it for hockey. They also have a section about which games are "good" to watch based on the quality of the teams and the playoff importance to the result. Lots of middle of the road matchups to start off of course as playoff implications are far down the road.
The NHL gives out points for losing. Does that matter?
It does in our season forecast, which simulates the rest of the schedule 50,000 times and tracks where every team ends up in the standings. In losses that go into overtime — both in real life and our simulated future contests — a team will get the Bettman Point. However, one of the interesting findings in the research we conducted for NHL Elo ratings was that how a team won or lost — in regulation, overtime or the dreaded shootout — doesn’t seem to matter when measuring a team’s quality. When it comes to predicting a team’s future games, all one-goal contests are created equal, even if they happen in a glorified skills competition and the loser winds up receiving different numbers of points.
It seems the loser point really does skew the standings quite a bit, where team strength is mostly unaffected by if they lose close in regulation vs OT/shootout.
Don't worry Squiggs - this will never be brought up in the snake thread.
*For those curious, there is a detailed breakdown of how the predictions work:
It gets pretty detailed, but the high level approach is they use ELO ratings to simulate the season 50,000 times. For those not familiar with ELO, the average is 1500 and you go up or down through the season. If you win your ELO goes up, and losing makes your ELO go down. The further the pre-game spread in ELO, the larger adjustment that is made after the game (ie. if you beat a team that has a much higher rating than you, you'll go up much more than if you had beat a team with a similar or lower rating to you).
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Last edited by mrkajz44; 11-24-2021 at 11:27 AM.
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Flames always do best when the pundits count them out.
Then when they're coming down the stretch hot, are top ten in the power rankings of people's hearts and look poised to make a run they again zag and lay a stinker.
Not many are counting the Flames in as contenders, but not many are counting them out either. They're just counting them. They're a very average team and have been a very average team for a long time. Drastic changes weren't made to improve or decline so most aren't expecting much different than last year, and you can't really blame them. They weren't a really good young team that got another year of experience that would make them better. They didn't pick up a top tier player at no cost. They don't have an elite prospect making the team this year. They have mostly the same team as last year. The Flames are the quasadillas of the NHL, not the best on the menu, definitely not the worst, they're just ok.
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Thought it would be interesting to check in on this now that we are 20 games into the season. The Flames stock has obviously risen, but by how much? They went from 1502 (where 1500 is average) all the way up to 1534, which is a pretty sizable jump as ELO can take some time to move in material amounts. Playoff changes have increased to 92% from 54% and cup chances improved from 2% to 5%.
The bad news? Still behind the Oilers in ELO, but just one point back!
Long story short: The model is essentially sold on the Flames being legit. The highest Stanley Cup odds are 14% and there are only 3 teams in double digits. The Flames are right there at 5% with a very good chance to make the playoffs and make some noise.
Thought it would be interesting to check in on this now that we are 20 games into the season. The Flames stock has obviously risen, but by how much? They went from 1502 (where 1500 is average) all the way up to 1534, which is a pretty sizable jump as ELO can take some time to move in material amounts. Playoff changes have increased to 92% from 54% and cup chances improved from 2% to 5%.
The bad news? Still behind the Oilers in ELO, but just one point back!
Long story short: The model is essentially sold on the Flames being legit. The highest Stanley Cup odds are 14% and there are only 3 teams in double digits. The Flames are right there at 5% with a very good chance to make the playoffs and make some noise.
interesting and likely defensible/realistic. Flames are +30 right now, so tracking +17 the rest of the way (just eyeballing league standings that would be about the equivalent of what teams like Boston, Pittsburgh etc are pumping out right now, just a little in the plus after 20 games sort of thing)- reverting to the mean for sure, which I think is reasonable
It's a little misleading to say "the model is sold on the Flames." Elo isn't really a model in the sense that it's tracking some underlying drivers of results - it's literally just a number that goes up when you win and down when you lose, so it's more of a description of the past than a predictor of the future.
Fun fact: Elo isn't an acronym, it's actually a guy's name: Arpad Elo was a physics professor who invented the rating system to use with Chess.
Not much movement from the quarter pole of the season. Odd went down a bit moreso based on other teams passing the Flames, rather than the Flames themselves dropping. The model makes a good argument that the Flames need a little something extra to be a real contender - the lack of finishing is probably the main underlying issue here.
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Last edited by mrkajz44; 02-07-2022 at 04:18 PM.
Reason: Clearly not getting 1531 points...
Five Thirty Eight - Now with NHL predictions! - Update: 20 games
