Never Apologize, Never Explain 2013-14

The predictions use these metrics, described below:

The Metrics

RS

RS is each team's points in the prior ECAC regular season:

PS

PS is the number of upset (lower seed) advances (+1) or eliminations (-1) in the previous season's ECAC tournament.  The consolation game is ignored.

The upsets in the last season's ECAC tournament were:

• Cornell upset Princeton in First Round
• Brown upset RPI in Quarterfinal
• Brown upset Quinnipiac in Semifinal
• Union upset Yale in Semifinal

Imp

Imp is the difference in points gained in the second half (games 12-22) minus the first half (games 1-11) of the prior ECAC regular season, divided by 2 (and rounded down).  A positive Imp indicates the team had a better second half:

WRet

WRet captures how much of last year's players' contribution returns (or has been lost to graduation or early departure).

First the returning strength of three subcomponents is calculated:

• RetF: returning % of points of top 9 scoring forwards
• RetD: returning % of points of top 4 scoring defensemen
• RetG: returning % of minutes of all goalies

We then weight these numbers by their position's contribution to the team at full strength (3 forwards, 2 defensemen, and 1 goaltender), and multiply the result by 3 to approximate the dispersion from prior Returning Strength metrics:

WRet = (3*RetF + 2*RetD + RetG)/6

The team breakdowns of  Returning Players are shown here.

All of last year's significant seniors are assumed non-returning, unless otherwise noted.  The seniors from last season returning are:

• None

The following significant players with eligibility remaining are not returning:

• Matt Lindblad, Dartmouth, Jr, F -- their #2 forward
• Troy Grosenick, Union, Jr, G -- their #1 goalie
• Josh Jooris, Union, Jr, F -- their #4 forward

The following significant players who did not play a significant portion of last season are returning.  These players are added to Harvard's returning numbers as they mark a unique case of a team with artifically depressed results from the prior year:

• Patrick McNally, Harvard, Jr, D -- defenseman (28 points in 2011-12)
• Max Everson, Harvard, Jr, D -- defenseman (4 points)
• Stephen Michalek, Harvard, Jr, G -- goalie (1336 minutes)

	RetF	RetD	RetG	WRet
Brown	.82	1.00	.27	.79
Clarkson	1.00	.73	.89	.89
Colgate	.77	.30	1.00	.65
Cornell	.61	.57	.99	.66
Dartmouth	.69	.57	1.00	.70
Harvard	.60	.71	1.00	.70
Princeton	.85	.39	.28	.60
Quinnipiac	.47	.18	.04	.30
RPI	.92	.51	.75	.76
SLU	.78	.42	1.00	.70
Union	.56	.67	.20	.53
Yale	.61	1.00	.06	.65

Avg10

Avg10 measures traditional program strength, by taking the team's mean number of Points over the prior 10 seasons.  This will be used to compute the expected Incoming factor.

	Avg10
Brown	16.8
Clarkson	20.8
Colgate	22.1
Cornell	27.8
Dartmouth	23.5
Harvard	22.5
Princeton	19.9
Quinnipiac	23.1
RPI	19.8
SLU	21.5
Union	23.8
Yale	22.6

Putting it All Together

From these independent metrics, we now generate several calculated metrics:

All but the last of these calculated metrics are just convenient conceptual groupings.  The final metric, Nieu, could be calculated directly from the independent metrics.  But we'll sacrifice brevity for clarity of expression.

Harvard is the exception for WInc.  The purpose of adding their players returning from  suspensions into the RetD and RetG metrics was to take into account that last season was artifically depressed.  However, if the only thing we changed was the WRet metric, that would actually overemphasize Harvard's unusually bad 2013 finish.  Therefore, just this once, we allow Harvard to retain their original WInc value of 1 - 0.58 = .42 wehile also benefittig from the increased .70 WRet value.