NHL Season Preview: Teams and Trends
By Jeremy Tuch
NHL teams are businesses just like normal companies, and trend up or down over the course of time. Where does your team trend coming into the 2018-19 season?
One of the more fun things to do before the season is to write up your season predictions, predicting everything from Stanley Cup winners to award winners and trades. Then, as the season unfolds, keep it handy and review it constantly to see how wrong you really were. Then, at about the All-Star Break, rip it up in frustration, as the point of keeping it around simply vanishes due to how wrong you got it.
Here’s another wacky prediction post that I’m sure you’re sick of by now. What I’m going to do to try and set this apart from any other prediction post is to split the 31 NHL teams into tiers, and identify in which direction they are trending. This way, my predictions are vague enough to be right toward the end of the year, and I won’t have to tear it apart come January due to me getting it very, very wrong.
I’ll still be wrong, I’ll find a way.
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The way this will work is simple. We’ll go through each tier, team by team within that tier. We’ll see how they did last year, in what direction they are trending, and what happened this past calendar year to cause this trend. This, in a way, will give us a prediction that’s vague, but not too vague.
The tiers are divided up as such:
Tier 1: Elite Tier – These are the creme de la creme of NHL teams coming into this year. These are the teams you’ll likely be talking about into May and June.
Tier 2: Bubble In Tier – These teams have what it takes to make it to the playoffs, but there does exist doubt whether they will be good enough to advance far, or even make the dance at all.
Tier 3: Bubble Out Tier – These teams are scratching on the surface of the playoff picture, but aren’t quite there, for one reason or another.
Tier 4: The Charlie Kelly Tier – These teams are complete wild cards. There are fundamental questions with these teams that can land them anywhere between playoff contention and lottery contention.
Tier 5: Tier of the Tank – These teams will be irrelevant by December, save for a couple of days in late February when they sell off their good players to better teams and become even worse.
Disclaimer, I can and probably will be wrong with at least a couple of teams here. That’s the point of predictions, remember?