2025-26 Season Preview, I guess

fine

I have a standings projection model which I run every year. It’s not the most sophisticated thing ever: it takes team depth charts, applies projected player Wins Above Replacement values to them, and pumps out a number. Other people have models that use 1000s of rounds of detailed game simulations and project time on ice, injuries, coaching impacts, rookie estimates, even potential trades. Mine does not. It’s more of a curiosity than something I carefully tend to and work hard to improve on every off-season. But it usually does pretty well:

Last year, by the performance metric we use to “evaluate” standings points predictions, which is the average absolute points error per team (i.e. the model was on average, 10.4 points off compared to the actual standings), it was the best one. On average, it’s been okay, beat out by the betting odds, Dom from the Athletic, and EvolvingHockey but well above the “wisdom of the crowd” from fans (both their average prediction per team and the average fan performance).

Possibly because the model is less laboured-over than some of the others, it tends to pump out some unexpected results that get me clowned on all summer. Sometimes those wild takes are actually right though. Ahead of 2022-23, it projected the Bruins (who had just fired long-time coach Bruce Cassidy) would win the President’s Trophy. Fans thought this was ridiculous, and their consensus was 95 points. Boston of course set an NHL record for points in a season that year. Ahead of 2023-24, it made a similarly bullish projection for the Winnipeg Jets while fans universally predicted a big drop-off to 88 points. My conversation with Dom at the time (who again, I have to emphasize in fairness is the best at this):

The Jets got 110.

I’m not going to go super in-depth on the 2025-26 projection, but I will at least explain why the model says what it does and what it might suggest about what’s about to happen this season. Remember what the graphic showed above: everybody is always way off on the standings. It’s all about the margins.

Pacific Division

The easy part is that Vegas and Edmonton are clearly the class of the division. My model is extra high on them (in EDM’s case, because it really loves their blueline and in VGK’s because of their bulletproof top nine) but nothing wild. LA’s moves on the blueline were weird, but the model at least seems to think that people are weighing that too highly and not appreciating the depth of their forward group. It’s funny though, this model has been underrating the Kings for years and now it finally puts them around their usual 100ish points when people sour on the roster.

Vancouver is sketchier, but it’s a well-balanced group with a top-two defenceman in Hughes, two solid other defencemen in Marcus Pettersson and Hronek, and Elias Pettersson the forward probably poised for a bounceback. Notably the lack of injury projections benefit Filip Chytil, about whom it is naively positive.

The Kraken are nothing special, but some good and young players have the projection closer to mid than the basement. The opposite is the case for Anaheim, who a lot of people see as a potential break-out team due to Joel Quenneville. This model sees a team who was bottom-three in xGoal differential last year and has a lot of players who are terrible defensively including new acquisitions. They over-performed last year (even though they finished 26th) and, with no way to price in Quenneville’s impact, they’re expected to slink back down.

Calgary also overperformed, winning a ton of close games (which is not a repeatable team-level skill) and riding their goalie. That roster is anemic, with a lot of okay players but arguably no clear-cut first line forwards. The model, which doesn’t even like Rasmus Andersson, sees them falling apart.

The Sharks still suck, unless Celebrini gets like 110 points.

Central Division

Stars and Avs, great teams. The model is extra keen on the Mammoth because they’ve populated their blueline with analytical darling type players like John Marino, Olli Maatta, and Nate Schmidt to go with their young dynamic forward group. The Wild are good enough.

Winnipeg is a tough one to see, especially since being early on their success was a big feather in the model’s cap a few years back. But losing Ehlers is a really tough pill to swallow, Toews at 2C is a big risk, and Dylan Samberg missing time isn’t ideal either. As it stands, it’s got the Jets on the outside looking in - barely.

As for the Blues, the model, which projects WAR by weighing the individual components based on the past three seasons + an age curve, isn’t as heavily tuned to the post-Montgomery team performance as St. Louis fans would like it to be. If they get the 2025 calendar year version of Cam Fowler and Colton Parayko for a full season, they should be pretty well set-up to make the playoffs again, but there are no guarantees and there are some older guys in big roles here.

The Predators were dire last year but they did get PDO’d to hell and they do have some good players on the roster including a goalie who could bounce back. I have them the wrong side of mid and not fully in the basement, but if they start slow they could start selling things off.

The Hawks also have some decent players, even if they do suck.

Metropolitan Division

The Devils roster is quite good and their most important players are still young, which really helps them out. It would certainly also help this model’s performance if Jack Hughes can actually stay healthy.

Both the model and the fans seem mostly aligned on the Canes (very good) and the Rangers (not amazing but not nearly as bad as they were last year).

The Caps… obviously the model taking the Caps from 111 points last year to 91 is going to be a headline takeaway. I don’t need to rehash the 2024-25 Capitals thing in a ton of detail, but there is obviously quite a bit of regression baked into this prediction as well as heavy age curve effects on Ovechkin and Carlson. The model really likes the composition of their defence but does not see a lot of high-end talent in the forward group. We’ll see. If the Caps stay near the top of the division, I’m happy to give their fans even more satisfaction.

It doesn’t help that the model’s hot Capitals take is side-by-side with arguably its hottest take, which is that the Penguins won’t be that bad. Basically everyone agrees the Pens are going to suck this year: Dom says 74 points, fans say 74 points, betting odds say 76 points, etc. That would put the team in the basement and primed for a run at Gavin McKenna or another top pick, which as a Pens fan I would be very pleased to see. That’s contingent on some stuff that hasn’t happened yet though, namely the team trading Rakell and/or Rust and/or Karlsson, which they notably have not yet done even though they had an excellent opportunity in an offseason where everyone had cap space and no one else was selling. And frankly, I think you can look at this roster and fairly say that they do not suck enough. Almost all of their offseason additions looked like they were setting the table to clear guys out from the top of the lineup, and then they didn’t, and because a good number of those guys (e.g. Mantha, Novak, Wotherspoon) are analytical darlings, they leave the team projecting annoyingly decently enough to stay out of the basement but not good enough to threaten a playoff spot. If I win the “standings projection contest” again, it’ll probably because the model was right about this one. I could see them starting hot-ish (new coach bump?) and then refusing to give up and sell off.

The last three aren’t that interesting; Columbus dealt with injuries last year but they also massively overperformed, the Isles’ blueline is looking questionable barring Schaefer stepping in looking like Scott Niedermayer, and the Flyers’ roster is nothing special and their goaltending looks dire. Of those three, the Flyers are somewhat intriguing to me just because they were 16th in xGoal differential last year but 27th in goal differential, the biggest gap in the league and goalies are goalies.

Atlantic Division

Some decent alignment to start before things go off the rails. The Lightning forward group is unreal, their defence is more questionable with the age curve attached. The Leafs have enough star power to mostly weather losing Marner and their goaltending projects extremely well. The Sens forward group isn’t anything special (although it could be if Tkachuk and Stützle can hit their ceilings) but the defence looks really nicely composed at the moment.

Okay, now time for the Buffalo of it all. Fans and the betting line agree that the Sabres aren’t terrible but they’re not remotely playoff-calibre. 84 points for the fans, 85 for the sportsbooks.

The analytical models do not agree. The Athletic says 90 points. HockeyViz says 91. This one says 94. EvolvingHockey says 99.

What is happening exactly? There’s no easy explanation. The Sabres were 29th in xGoal differential last year and 24th in goal differential, so there’s no big regression effect about to kick in. It all comes down to the roster itself, which on paper doesn’t look very impressive but for these projections, inexplicably looks great and without a ton of weaknesses. You might look at Josh Norris 1C and think “what the hell are they doing,” but the model sees a decent enough player on a roster with a lot of decent enough players. Ryan McLeod, Owen Power, Zach Benson, Alex Tuch, Josh Doan, Jason Zucker, Michael Kesselring, Conor Timmins — all pretty good to great players. This is a team that’s had abundant weak links for years and seems, maybe, to have patched them up for a change. Add in Dahlin and Thompson, who both profile like superstars, and there you go.

Would I put money on it? Hell no. But it’s something to watch for.

The other elephant in the room is Montréal, whose fans have picked up the annoying habit (inherited from Sens fans) of assuming that any remotely negative take on their team is ultra-biased engagement bait. I won’t belabour this, but the Habs’ record last year was boosted hard by a lot of success in close games (which like I said isn’t a repeatable skill) and they out-performed their terrible underlying numbers all season. Them making the playoffs was a fluke — a welcome one, and great for development, but one nonetheless. It wouldn’t be a fluke this year since most people have them in the mix, but there are still question marks. Kirby Dach is still their 2C, there are holes all over the roster waiting for young players or new acquisitions to fill them, noted not-analytical-darling Mike Matheson will still play more minutes than he ought to, etc. Ivan Demidov stepping into the league as a legit top-line contributor would go a long way towards cancelling out these concerns, and I thought they had a tremendous offseason and legitimately improved the roster. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if they end up closer to 90-95 points, but I don’t think it’s remotely impossible that they step back to leap forward either.

The model has Boston a bit higher than consensus, basically on the strength of Pastrnak, McAvoy, Swayman, and Hampus Lindholm. The rest of the roster grades out at basically replacement level but that’s a solid enough set of four best players to do some heavy lifting and get the team to 21st-ish.

Then there are the Wings, who remain in purgatory in pretty much everyone’s projections. Chiarot is still on the top pair, the roster is still dotted with random guys, Gibson’s recent track record has some heights but is generally nothing special. At least their core is young, though, so if you squint you could imagine Raymond, Kasper, Seider, and Edvinsson all taking a leap that gets them into the postseason.

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So yeah, there you go. Let’s see who ends up being the least extremely wrong. Enjoy the start of the season.