Forecasting is hard. If I could do it well I wouldn't be picking an NHL fantasy team. I would be picking stocks. And I would be swanning around on my yacht in the mediterranean. With that excuse in mind how are things going in the play-off pool.
After the first round of play-offs I've come out ahead of the pack but nowhere near first place. That honour goes to team Rye followed by team Disaronno. I follow in a close third, ten points back from the front.
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rank | Team Points
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1 | Rye 51
2 | Disaronno 43
3 | Strobes 41
4 | Rum 38
5 | Everglo 37
6 | Moonshine 35
7 | Absinthe 34
8 | Jack Daniels 33
9 | Jagermeister 31
10 | Beer 29
11 | Brandy 28
12 | Gin 27
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But as Henry Jones Sr. would say "thersh no shilver medal for finishing shecond". I either place first or I lose. So based upon how things have been going so far how am I projected to finish? This would be the time for any Jets HR people to send me that contract and not finish reading this blog.
Turns out not well. I project forward how I expect points will evolve based upon a couple key pieces of information. First, half of all teams are eliminated from the playoffs each round. This reduces the number of players in the pool by roughly half each round that we go through. It also means that on average each person in the pool should see their points per round half each successive round. This is a basic geometric growth process that you might have seen in grade 11 math and it should be a fairly reasonable way to project forward how many points each fantasy team should get based on information from the first round.
In addition to this we also know which NHL players continue to be in the pool and which ones have exited. Even if a fantasy team continues to have ten of their players, if they're not particularly productive then it really doesn't matter that a majority of the fantasy team has not yet been eliminated. Conversely, if someone has only a few very productive players they might be able to milk a whole lot of points out of them even though their fantasy team has been eliminated. Team Rye finds themselves in this latter situation where they only have four players after the first round but they're unfortunately very productive players.
So this next assumption that I make is that, for the second round, each team will get the same amount of points that they got in the first round, minus the points of the players that were eliminated in the first round. This amount then halves for each additional round. In math terms it looks like this:
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Total projected points are equal to the already earned points in the first round, Xp, plus the projected points from the remaining rounds. Xp-n is a term for all of the points earned by players in the first round who were eliminated and therefore cannot earn any more points. Taking into account that half of all NHL players will be eliminated, the difference is then divided by a geometric factor as the rounds of play-offs progress.
This is how everyones points are projected to evolve.
And this is the final rank estimation based upon this projection.
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Rank | Team
----------+-------------
1 | Disaronno
2 | Rye
3 | Jack Daniels
4 | Gin
5 | Everglo
6 | Strobes
7 | Jagermeister
8 | Rum
9 | Beer
10 | Absinthe
11 | Moonshine
12 | Brandy
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This bodes poorly for my fantasy NHL team. So what went wrong here? In looking back at the regression results from my original model a couple of things leap out. First, the model put a big emphasis on goaltending. The model estimated a large coefficient for the save percentage term but it didn't do it very precisely. This is the root cause of the model predicting Montreal to do well. It overemphasized the great season that Carey Price had. On the back of this I picked two Montreal players. The remaining variables are also not all that precisely estimated which should induce a lot of uncertainty in the predictions.
The second thing that went wrong was idiot human error in the form of my own stupid picks. Despite saying that I would only pick players from teams that had a good chance of advancing in a series I picked two players from Nashville. I probably should have avoided the Nashville - Chicago series where the betting markets basically predicted a toss-up.
But all is not lost. As of writing this I am in decent position with a ten point gap between me and the next fantasy team. I've kept pace with teams Rye and Disaronno. There are a couple of reassuring reasons why these projections might be wrong. First, I bet the heaviest on Anaheim by picking up three of their players. They then proceeded to destroy Winnipeg in very short order (don't deny it, it happened) but that meant that the series only went four games. Fantasy teams including team Disarrono bet heavily on Chicago where the series went to seven games and his players had three additional games to get points. The Minnesota - Chicago series does not look like it is going seven games. Besides this, team Rye has three of his remaining players on Minnesota and team Disarrono has five players on Chicago. One of them is very screwed after this round.
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