Every year, right before the season starts, I run a prediction contest for readers. I come up with 10 simple questions about what’s about to happen — which teams will and won’t make the playoffs, which jobs are safe, which players will have good seasons, that sort of thing. You send in your answers, and we throw it all into a big database and wait.
This is one of my favorite posts of the year for two reasons. First, your predictions for the season are consistently off the mark, giving me endless opportunities to tease you while feeling better about my own equally flawed forecasts.
But there’s a bonus to this sort of thing, in that it also functions as a stealth survey of where fans are at heading into a season. I don’t know too many places where you can get this sort of volume of hockey fan opinions. It’s not a truly unbiased poll because it’s self-selected instead of random and I think we can all agree my readers are smarter than everyone else’s. But it’s pretty close, and it can be interesting to dig into the data and see what the wider hockey world seems to be thinking.
Today, we’re diving into this year’s contest to uncover some valuable insights. Last year, nobody could predict the Bruins’ performance, but this time, let’s see where your predictions land. Ready to crack open the books and explore? Check out this year’s contest here.