Revisiting playoff predictions

The Stanley Cup is awarded, and as you may remember, way back in April, we predicted the playoffs here. Let's go to the scoreboard for the final tally

1. Your editor (9-6, claiming tie-breaker, since I was the only one to predict the Kings would win the Cup)

t-1. GoPens! (9-6)

t-3. Mike Darnay / Natasha / The Confluence (8-7)

6. James Conley (6-9)

7. TKN (4-11)

First of all, the predictions are brutal and unforgiven filling out a bracket on Day 1 for the entire tournament, since if you're not correct in the first round, you're screwed the rest of the tournament. This doomed our esteemed colleague Mr. Conley, who predicted that both eventual SCF participants would each lose in Round 1. There were 8 instances I counted where a Pensburgh staff member chose a team to lose in Round 1, and they went on to win at least Round 2, leaving a huge dagger in our pre-populated predictions. Just goes to show how fine of a line it is between bitter disappointment and ultimate glory.

But, to our credit, we did go a combined 23-5 in the first round of the Eastern Conference playoffs, which is pretty impressive. The top five finishers went 19-1 in the East in the first round too, which makes it even more impressive and shows a knowledge base to be proud of.

However, we could probably all stand to stay up later and watch a little more Western Conference regular season games, because we only went 16-12 predicting the first round out there. The worst series would be the Colorado/Minnesota one, where only Mr. Darnay correctly predicted the Wild and the other 6 chalked up huge losses, with two predictions of the Avalanche making it to the Stanley Cup Finals.

The second round was brutal, we only had 3 correct calls in the East - Natasha being the only one to call Rangers over Pens, and myself and Conley to call Montreal over Boston. Out West in the second round, surprisingly, we were better with 3 people predicting the Kings to win the Pacific and 4 predicting the Blackhawks to win the Central.

None of us had the Rangers winning 3 rounds of the playoffs, but GoPens! Gets a gold star for being the only participant to correctly predict a Conference Final (Kings/Hawks) and he even called that one exactly right, choosing the Kings in 7. I also had the Kings winning the West, and winning the Cup, to make your editor the only participant to identify the winner from before it started.