We’re a quarter of the way through the NHL season and it has been one of the more unpredictable seasons in recent years.
Some of the bigger stories of the year have included the Tampa Bay Lightning’s resurgence and the Edmonton Oilers slow start, but there have been some success stories so far in the NHL. Teams that nobody predicted would be anywhere near the playoffs started hot and while most people wrote it off as a fluke, three (plus a bonus team) of them are still holding onto playoff spots.
These three teams are: The New Jersey Devils, Vegas Golden Knights and Detroit Red Wings.
We looked at nearly every major news publication that did NHL predictions to start the season including TSN, The Hockey News, CBS, 17 NHL.com staff writers and many more. Even some of the more prominent figures in the hockey community building models like Micah Blake McCurdy and others who can offer differ from the norm with their projections.
For example, here’s a full snapshot of NHL.com’s projections for the 2017-18 playoffs – not to pick on them, but they did they just had most amount of people participate in their projections.
At this point, New Jersey and Vegas are sitting pretty near the tops of their division, while Detroit has just snuck in into third in the Atlantic. They're not the only one battling for a spot either. The Canucks are currently tied with the Dallas Stars and Anaheim Ducks for the final Wild Card spot, but are losing the tie-breakers -- without that, we'd have a fourth team to add to the list.
Obviously, it’s early. The season could end with none of these teams in the playoffs and everyone could have been right all along, but this is more about how fun and unpredictable the NHL season has been so far.
In an era where accuracy in predictions are higher than ever, it’s exciting to see a couple teams defy the odds.
