Every year during the NHL preseason, I make a series of bold predictions for the upcoming regular season.
“Bold” is the key word. It’s no fun to make safe predictions.
This season, though, I may have been too bold — which is all part of the fun.
Here’s an audit of perhaps my worst prediction season yet.
The hits
Utah Mammoth make the playoffs
In a loaded Central Division, it was anything but guaranteed that the Utah Mammoth would make the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
And thank goodness they did, for my sake. I don’t cheer for the team, but if they had missed the playoffs, I wouldn’t have gotten much right this season at all.
Vegas Golden Knights make the Stanley Cup Final
OK, the full prediction was that the Vegas Golden Knights would beat the Toronto Maple Leafs in the Stanley Cup Final, with Mitch Marner taking home the bragging right against his former team.
We’ll call the glass half full.
The Golden Knights did not win the Cup, but they fell just two games short. Marner played a massive role in their playoff success, commanding a 7-point lead over the second-leading playoff scorer and placing fourth in Conn Smythe voting for playoff MVP.
As for the Maple Leafs, they went the opposite direction, winning the draft lottery instead.
The misses
Sam Rinzel wins the Calder Trophy
I saw Sam Rinzel as this season’s Lane Hutson, to the extent that he’d win the Calder Trophy as the rookie of the year.
Both players:
- Were drafted later than most Calder Trophy winners.
- Are offensive defensemen.
- Scored at high rates in the single-digit number of games they’d played the previous season.
It didn’t work out that way for Rinzel. He split the season between the NHL and the AHL, and wasn’t anything particularly jaw-dropping at either level.
By no means does it mean Rinzel is a bad player, but perhaps he won’t turn into Hutson.
Evgeni Malkin gets traded to the Florida Panthers
The Pittsburgh Penguins were supposed to be the only team actively trying to get worse this year, yet they somehow made the playoffs. And on the flip side, the back-to-back Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers somehow missed the postseason.
Given that they were in the race down the stretch, the thought of the Penguins trading any of their stars was out of the question, and the Panthers just weren’t in a position to go all-in again.
Malkin and the Penguins have since come to an agreement on a one-year contract extension to keep him in Pittsburgh next season. The deal does stipulate, though, that Malkin is to submit a three-team list in January of teams to which he can be traded, so depending on where the Penguins stand at that time, it’s not out of the question that a move like this could happen for the reasons that I speculated before the season began.
Clayton Keller scores 100 points
I’ve missed by 10-12 points on this prediction two years in a row now. The laws of jinx dictate that as soon as I stop predicting it, Clayton Keller will score 100 points.
Don’t worry, Mammoth fans. I’ll get out of his way for next season.
It wasn’t a failure of a season by any means, though, for Keller. He maintained nearly identical offensive numbers to last year while improving significantly on the defensive side of the puck — not to mention leading his team to the playoffs and winning Olympic gold during the break.
Mikhail Sergachev finishes top 5 in Norris Trophy voting
With Mikhail Sergachev taking on a much bigger role since being traded to Utah, he seemed like a prime candidate to hit the 80-point plateau and establish himself as a top five to 10 defenseman in the world.
He’s undoubtedly a No. 1 defenseman on a playoff team, as he proved this year, but the Norris Trophy race is always insanely competitive. Perhaps his ceiling is a little below that threshold.
As I said with Keller, though, he’s probably going to do it as soon as I stop predicting it.
Logan Cooley scores more points than anyone else born in 2004 or later
Logan Cooley missing almost three months of the season with an injury makes this one hard to judge.
No, he didn’t score more than everyone his age or younger, even if you average it out on a points-per-game level. But had he had the ability to keep his momentum going for a full 82 games, who knows where he would have ended up?
For context, 15 of his 24 goals this season came in games wherein he scored more than once. When he’s on a roll, there’s no holding him back. If he stays healthy the entirety of next season, he could be one of the most productive players in his age bracket.
Thoughts?
Did you make any NHL predictions this year? How’d you do? Do you have any for next year?
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