Weekend rankings: We’re back, it’s too early, and all the good teams are bad
Welcome back, NHL. And welcome back to the NHL weekend rankings.
If you’re a longtime reader who knows how this all works, feel free to skip ahead to the Bonus Five. But if you’re new, or you could use a refresher, please read the next bit before you rush off to yell at me in the comments.
These rankings are a bit different from some of the others you might find out there. We’re not trying to capture a snapshot of how things stand in the league right now; instead, we’re more interested in trying to figure out how things will end up. The rankings here are based on two questions: Who’s winning the Cup, and who’s going to finish dead last? Simple questions, but hard ones to get right.
So how do we do it? The idea is to take it slow, starting from something that feels like a consensus early on and then gradually adjusting based on what’s happening on the ice. The key there is the “gradually” part; we try really hard not to overreact to a few games here and there. That means that a team doesn’t shoot up the rankings just because they have a good week, or beat the defending champs. And we don’t give up on a preseason favorite just because they stumble out of the gate. Hold that thought.
This way of looking at things isn’t better or worse than the more common approach that other rankings take; it’s just different. The advantage is that we’re less likely to get tripped up by short-term flukes – for example, we never had the Oilers as a bottom-five team last year, even when they had the worst record in the league in mid-November. The main downside is that some of those overreactions are fun, and I get that it’s frustrating when you see your team ranked behind someone they just beat the brakes off of. And yeah, sometimes we’re a little behind on spotting an important trend. As my kids will tell you, that’s not out of character for me.
So that’s it: Think long-term, react cautiously, and don’t expect the rankings to swing wildly based on what happened in the last week. And one more thing: Each week will feature a top and bottom five, plus an extra team in each section that didn’t make the list but feels worth mentioning. That team is not necessarily ranked sixth – if I wanted to do that every week, it would just be a top and bottom six. They’re just a team to talk about. For reasons I’ve never quite understood, this part really seems to trip people up.
Oh, and we also like to throw in a bonus top five based on whatever’s happening. Like this one: