I Suck at Picking the West

It may just be the sting of picking the Jets, and then watching them get swept, but I really suck at picking the West.  As with last year, I got all 4 Eastern Conference series correct, but only shot 50% in the West again.

I had hoped my increased statistical focus would lessen the gap from East to West, as I see the teams in the East play a whole lot more.  It didn't really work, even though the Kings didn't make the playoffs this year for me to incorrectly pick them to lose, as I did in 2013 and 2014.  Here are my pick results for the last three years.

 

As a reminder, here's how my mathematical rankings laid out this year's teams. 

 

Overall, they worked pretty well.  If you combine the rankings with a little bit of subjective analysis, I feel very good that I correctly identified the real contenders; Chicago, Tampa Bay, New York and Minnesota.

Where things didn't work out so well for me was at the other end of the spectrum.  I went with the numbers picking against Calgary and Anaheim, and got burned.

For the Calgary series, I think the numbers were wrong in identifying Vancouver as a much stronger team than Calgary.  Vancouver has had lousy showings in their recent playoff history, so I should've been a little skeptical of that.  Oh well.

Regarding Anaheim, I may be willing to chalk them up as a statistical anomaly.  I still don't feel entirely bad about picking Winnipeg.  You look at Anaheim you see a top heavy offense overly relying on Perry and Getzlaf. You see an inexperienced goal tandem. You see a head coach with a terrible playoff record. You see a team that was 19th in shot differential in close situations (only Ottawa and Calgary was worse among playoff teams). You see a team that was only +10 in goal differential, worst among all playoff teams.

All they really had going for them was a preposterous record of 33-1-7 in 1 goal games (nhl.com has stats on this category going back to 1998, and this is by far the best record any team has ever had).  Was that an anomaly, or does Anaheim have a truly unique trait to win close games.  I feel okay with presuming it to be the former.

I'll tweak my mathematical rankings going forward, but it was a pretty good tool.  From it, I picked the Hawks over the Rangers in the finals, although the Rangers have some serious work to do with the Caps right now to get that far!