The TBRW? prognostication system has a few surprises for this year's ECAC standings. Most interestingly, we predict an enormous improvement in Cornell's standing, as the Big Red recapture home ice for the playoffs, rising as high as second place in the conference.
The full statistical analysis of our predictions is included under "Never Apologize, Never Explain," below.
Our enhanced predictor, HPred takes into account the past history of the ECAC members, as well as the statistical effect regression to the mean. In some cases over the past few seasons, our base stat, Pred, though out-performing the ECAC Coaches' Poll, has failed to predict a big move in the standings for one team or another.
In many cases, this has been a failure to predict a traditionally strong team returning to form after a few lean years. In other cases it has been a traditional also-ran, falling dramatically after one or two seasons in the sun, which has foiled our predictor.
HPred (Historical-Predictor) factors in the historical strength of each ECAC team over the history of modern Div. I ECAC play (by league records, since the 1964-65 season). Effectively, the Pred stat is pulled or pushed half the distance back towards the lifetime winning percentage of the program (there are some normaliziation effects which we need not go into here).
The results of HPred for 2000 are as follows:
Each team starts with its previous regular season standing RS.
The number of post-season upset wins or losses PS is then added.
Finally, the newest cast member of our statistical stage, HPred, is calculated. HPred is easily derived from Pred when you have the career records of each team in conference play, EPct.
The average of EPct is slightly different from .500, owing to changing in the length of the schedule and conference membership over its history. Therefore, we also compute MEPct, a modification of EPct that pulls the average EPct back to .500. MEPts, meanwhile, represents the number of points you would get with the team's traditional conference percentage, normalized for the relative strength of current conference members, over a full 22 game slate.
MEPct = EPct*(.500 / Mean[EPct]) MEPts = MEPct * 44 Finally, HPred is then derived from simply averaging the old stat, Pred, and the historical measure, MEPts. HPred = (Pred + MEPts)/2