Hockey Pool Expert

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With 4-5 games remaining on each team’s schedule, let’s see how well TSP’s updates fared for the 2010-2011 NHL season:

1. Oilers Can’t Lose – With 5 games to go, the Oilers are about to clinch last place overall and the fans don’t mind a bit.  The team has turned over personelle and the rookies look better every game.  In contrast, the Flames have played just well enough to almost certainly miss the playoffs and also to miss out on good draft picks, ensuring that they’ll keep on sucking hard for at least a few more years.  The Oilers won big time in 2010-2011, even though they lost more games than anyone.
2. Sharks’ Niemi & Niittymaki – Niemi and Niittymaki split games early on in the season as predicted.  The team lost a lot of games early on too, making these guys terrible fantasy picks.  Things changed midway through the season though once Niemi emerged as the clear-cut starter and the Sharks started winning, making Niemi a good mid-season draft waiver pickup.
3. Carey Price Likely to Start 65 Games – As of April 2nd, Price has 69 starts and is 2nd overall in wins.  Like TSP said, “Price will be an excellent sleeper pick.“
4. Luongo’s Stock Just Rose – Luongo and the Canucks fulfilled TSP’s predictions following the most under-reported news of the season, which was Vancouver’s change of Captaincy.  With 4 games to go, the Canucks have clinched the President’s Trophy for #1 overall in the league and Luongo is #1 in the league among goaltenders for wins. Luongo has also posted the 2nd highest Save % of his career (.927), the 2nd highest # of Shutouts (7), and a career-low Goals Against Average (2.14).
5. Seguin’s Icetime Could Improve – Fellow centerman Mark Savard has only played 25 times this year, creating space for Seguin to shine.  But Seguin dropped the ball, earning an average of only 12:15 of ice-time per game on what turned out to be a cup contending team.  To Seguin’s credit though, he made the Bruins and stuck in the line-up all season.  Still, Boston acquired centerman Rich Peverly in late February to fill the hole they’d hoped Seguin would be ready to fill.
6. Grab John Carlson If You Can – John Carlson ended up as Washington’s top-scoring defenseman plus was 4th in team, +/- trailing only Ovechkin, Backstrom and Semin.  If that wasn’t enough, he was 2nd in average icetime among Caps with 20+ games on the season.
7. Trade Deadline Deals – Several predictions were in this post, so it’s hard to grade the result.  In general, the predictions were luke-warm.  Dustin Penner was a miss, James Neal turned into a shootout hero but never got to play with Crosby, and Thomas Kaberle did exactly what was expected.  As for the non-trades with Philly, Vancouver and Calgary, I guess we’ll never know about those, though Iginla was great down the stretch and proved again that the Flames would be morons for ever trading him.

In sum, here’s how we’d score these results:

1. Check
2. Half Check, Half Miss (though a mid-season update would have made this better)
3. Check
4. Check and Check
5. Check (though Seguin dropped the ball)
6. Check
7. Half Check, Half Miss

All in all, a pretty good run of success for TSP’s 2010-2011 NHL Hockey Draft season!