Congratulations to the Los Angeles Kings – not what we would have predicted

This first year of applying Puckonomics to playoff predictions has been a big learning for us. It is clear that at a macro level, using team performance for the entire season is not a good leading indicator of how a team will do (note: keep in mind our analysis ignores actual team standings, just aggregate performance of team players).

Over the next coming weeks I will dive deeper into the regular season statistics of individual players on both the Los Angeles Kinds and New Jersey Devils to see if there was some leading indicators that would have predicted these two teams would have met in the finals. I am sure there will be some nuggets that would have some clues that both of them would have a good run. Stay tuned.