1) Just a quick thought this Friday. We are accustomed to the numerous publicized annual right of making pre season predictions. Heck, our site does that as well, although as we pointed out recently we believe many do it a bit early, but that's fine. However the more recent trend of making preseason player rankings seems to be epitome of nonsense. Dare we say bullshit/waste of time/ink, etc?
2) We wonder/can't tell if these 'ratings' are a projection for the upcoming season, OR based upon last season's accomplishments? Are they predicting that these are going to be the top impact players going forward, or are they based upon last years stats? One particular inane list was compiled by The Hockey News.(THN) Predictably the top 6 had 3 Red Wings. Now was that because those 3 were intrumental in bring Detroit a Cup OR are they predicting that (Lidstrom/Zetterberg and Datsyuk will be 3 of the top 6 players in the NHL this next season? There's no doubting that Lidstrom (assuming he stays healthy at 37) will be in the top 3 of all defenders, but will the 2 forwards for the Wings again be in the top 5 in scoring? (They were 4th and 6th respectively in 07-08. Both were career highs!)
3) That aside, the aspect of their listing that immediately got our attention was THN's listing of The Toronto Maple Leafs goalie, Vesa Toskola at 35. They had only Luongo at 7, Henrik Lundqvist at 14, Evgeni Nabokov at 16, Martin Brodeur at 24 and J-S Giguere at 25 ahead of him. Can we read into this positioning that Toskala the 6th best goalie in the NHL??? Would any one have placed him so high if one were to make a list of the top 20 goalies in the league today? When we did a short review of NHL goalies we placed Vesa somewhere in the 15-20th range. (Unless THN is predicting a career year in TO this coming season?) Here is our list (in no particular order) of goalies we believe are better that Toskola. Nabokov, Brodeur, Luongo, Lundqvist, Turco, Giguere, Kiprusoff, DiPietro, Fleury, Bryzgolov, Vokoun, Miller, Huet, Price, Lecalire
4) Others have made similar lists, usually placing Crosby and Ovechkin at #'s 1 and 2. However we have to also add that lists with all positions combined like this are hard to judge. Perhaps if they had each position ranked separately it would be easier. Then seeing Toskola at 6 would seem as absurd as it should be viewed. Have the top 10 defensemen, centers, goalies, wings listed. If one has to engage in such an activity that would seem to be the better method. It would be our preference if these predictive lists weren't done at all. Its just our opinion, we could be wrong?
2 comments:
I agree on points 1, 2 and 3, but would beg to differ on point 4, suggesting that these lists do serve a purpose in the classification of players for upcoming pool picks. That's it... The issues behind accuracy and projections are clearly flaw-filled, but realistically, most idiots who want to cough up money in hockey pools will use the lists to set me up with cash, so that's fine with me...lol
1) Czech: Good point with regard to using those lists as a baseline for picking a fantasy team. Its been a number of years since we've done that so we overlooked that aspect.
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