You don't have to agree, but to say that it flat out doesn't make sense to rank NYI behind those teams is burying your head in the sand. You know there are red flags in their analytics and it's not like we don't have recent example of a team going deep with bad underlying numbers and crashing back down to earth the next season.
Will they definitely fall? No. Is it completely rational for someone to look at what happened last season and come to the conclusion that they might? Yes.
Of course nobody knows, it's just funny to read the same thing every single season. The majority of these predictions have the Rangers and Devils making 20 to 30 point jumps and the Isles dropping 25 points with the same team from last year.
The underlying analytics angle is so poorly used. What bad stats? A PDO of 101.9 and a CF% right around 48%? Pretty much the exact numbers of the Trotz-led Capitals SC team? They were 24th in Corsi and had a high PDO. Maybe it's the way Trotz runs his teams? Or the other teams with +101 PDO from last year like the Capitals, Lightning, Leafs, and Penguins?
I'm not saying anything about you... I have my doubts too. It's just people that have a predetermined notion about how we will finish and sort some stat tables a couple of ways to prove their point and boom. I can sort stat tables that show how difficult we were to score against (usually tied to sustainability) and point to that. It's just that a 103-point team is unanimously being picked to miss the playoffs and in most scenarios, picked to be dead last in the division. I'm not tallying it up, but I'd guess we average around 7th place in these predictions. And we have the exact same team. Columbus lost their two best players and they are picked ahead of us across the board. They won't regress, but we will.
Again. I expect it. I pencil us in as a wild card team, but it's like this board has us hard coded into last place without much thought besides 'overachieved'. The problem is -- we are boring. Not a lot of flashy names, not an exciting game to watch. People love to look at rookies that haven't played a game yet and this shiny new toy is going to be good for a 20 point jump in the standings.
