Making playoff hockey predictions is a notoriously hard challenge.

In Michael Mauboussin’s The Success Equation, he created a continuum of luck and skill in different sports. All the way on the left of this continuum is the lottery, and on the right is chess. All luck on one side and all skill on the other.

Out of the four major sports in North America — baseball, football, basketball and hockey — hockey is the most luck-based and intuitively, the hardest to predict.

A couple of weeks ago, I detailed a new statistic I created: average game intensity. It is captured over a season and has a fairly simple equation: the average difference in games lost subtracted from the average difference in games won.

The statistics can be explained in greater detail here.

Previous data collected showed that intensity can be an equally good predictor of playoff success as regular-season point percentage. So, how did it do in the first round of the playoffs?

When using a lesser intensity as an indicator of success, the statistic was correct in three out of the eight series. When a greater intensity was used as an indicator of success (my original hypothesis), it was correct in five out of the eight series.

Both were one-off from a coin flip by one, which did not give me much confidence. But data is nothing without perspective.

How Were the Experts’ Playoff Hockey Predictions?

Sportsnet asked 23 hockey experts to predict the First Round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. The experts were right 61.96% of the time. For comparison, my statistic (when using the positive correlation) was 62.5% correct.

Neither statistic yields much confidence in the experts or my own statistic. Both are within 13 percent of becoming as reputable as a coin flip.

So, What Can We Learn?

Hockey is fun!

Sometimes, as fans and dedicated followers of the sport, we have to remember that hockey is a sport. It’s adrenaline-pumping, artful, physical, and sometimes just simply random.

I love playoff hockey and the statistics that go along with it, but sometimes we just need to sit back in awe of the randomness of the sport we love instead of making predictions. Stop saying that a team “doesn’t deserve” to be where they are. It’s hockey, everyone gets what they deserve. The sport’s randomness does not bode well in predicting the future; so just have a laugh sometimes.

For my methodology and my data, you can email me at [email protected].

John Smark