Tagged: playoffs 2010

This should be the most wonderful time of the year. Unfortunately for Canucks fans, it’s also usually the most heartbreaking. This year, however, there’s a different feeling in this city. We’re excited and nervous, but also optimistic. Perhaps the most optimistic we’ve been in years. The Canucks had a regular season to remember – I posted about all the team’s great accomplishments this year. They can run-and-gun with the best of them, and they’re one of the NHL’s most exciting teams. They repeated as Northwest Division champions and have home-ice advantage (at least for the first round). They have depth...

A lot of hockey reporters publicly lament this time of year, when the public expects them to make their playoff predictions known. The reasons behind their reluctance are simple and twofold. One, there are far more variables at play during a series than a single, winner-take-all game. Secondly, no one who is paid on the basis of their hockey expertise wants to be proven hopelessly wrong. Well, no one here gets paid for their opinions. And I have no fear of making my ambition public. 15-0 baby. A perfect season of playoff series predictions. If we can scale Mount Everest…...

For NHL players, playoff hockey comes down to one magic number: 16. 16 wins gets your name on the Stanley Cup and a place in hockey history. Since the 2004-05 lockout, eight teams have competed in the Stanley Cup final – Detroit (twice), Pittsburgh (twice), Anaheim, Ottawa, Carolina and Edmonton. A close examination of these teams provides us with some possible insight into what to expect over the next couple of months. Lesson #1 – You can’t win the Cup if you don’t score. Every Cup finalist has been a top-ten scoring team during the regular season, except Edmonton, who...

No one wants to play the dreaded Wings, but who would you rather the Canucks face in the first round: Nashville, Los Angeles, Colorado, or Calgary? Let’s grade the top nine teams in the Western Conference (throwing Calgary in the mix on the slight chance they snag the final spot) in three categories: Offense, Defense, and Goaltending. I’ve assigned a grade by giving the top NHL team in that category a mark of 100% and the lowest 50%, and used that scale to calculate a percentage for each team and then translate into a letter grade. Make sense? We’ll look...

Every March, intelligent hockey fans turn to Sports Club Stats to assess the odds of NHL teams making the playoffs, and to predict their playoff position once the season ends. Be thankful for computers. They do the heavy lifting, calculating every possible combination of game results (numbering in the hundreds of thousands). Factors such as a team’s home ice performance are worked in, and the odds are recalculated after every night’s games. The Canucks Vancouver has all but clinched a postseason berth, with only a 1 in 10,000 chance of missing at this point. No surprise there: the Canucks have...