75 hockey writers pick the winners and losers from the NHL playoffs

It’s a time-honoured tradition for hockey pundits, writers and bloggers to make predictions on the eve of the Stanley Cup playoffs.

With that in mind, and bored by the brief lull between the end of the regular season and playoffs, I compiled the first-round playoff predictions of about 75 hockey writers and pundits. It’s not exhaustive, but I have captured a representative chunk of data from most of the major outlets.

The following shows the portion of the media who picked a given team to win in the first round. It also shows the average number of games predicted for each series.

Eastern Conference

MTL: 55.6% OTT: 44% in 6.3 games
TBL: 98.6% DET: 1.6% in 5.8 games
NYR: 89% PIT: 10.7% in 5.5 games
WSH: 75% NYI: 25% in 6.4 games

Western Conference

STL: 66.7% MIN: 33% in 6.5 games
NSH: 8.2% CHI: 91.8% in 6.2 games
ANA: 58.2% WIN: 41.2% in 6.4 games
VAN: 43.8% CGY: 56.3% in 6.4 games

What did we learn?

• Of all the series, the Tampa Bay-Detroit one is the most lopsided. Only one writer picked Detroit. Detroit fans should take heart, however, as in 2012, 85% of the media picked Vancouver to beat LA. Sadly, they were wrong.
• The two all-Canadian series are the closest.
• There were very few predictions of 4-game sweeps. I collected 1008 individual data points for series length, and there are only 17 predictions of a 4-game sweep.
• I also did this in 2012. You can find those numbers on a second tab of my spreadsheet.

I’m confident that the media will get at least one series prediction wrong. Hopefully, for example, the Canucks beat those odds.