Is this the leader of the best team in the league?
Photo by Michael Miller via Wikimedia Commons

Power rankings are no fun for any writer or editor.  No matter the amount of effort or honesty involved in creating the rankings and slotting the teams, oversights happen and someone in every fanbase except the team ranked first overall will feel slighted and react like a toddler.

So we've set out to eliminate the effort by building a power rankings model based on underlying statistics and their predicative ability.  Our rankings aren't based solely on the current NHL standings, though points earned are a portion of the model, they are based on a number of underlying metrics so the rankings are constantly in flux. 

We're still tweaking the model, so we're not quite ready to unveil it, but consider this NHLNumbers' current best effort at predicting the standings and playoff pairings at the end of the season.  One item of note - 38% of the game is luck, and we don't attempt to predict or model that 38%, and we don't plan to.

The first edition of the NHLNumbers Predictive Power Rankings:

Based on these rankings, the predicted playoff matchups look like this:

These other 14 teams will be in the running for Seth Jones or Nathan MacKinnon:

17    Edmonton Oilers
18    Detroit Red Wings
19    Dallas Stars
20    Tampa Bay Lightning
21    Minnesota Wild
22    New York Islanders
23    Calgary Flames
24    Winnipeg Jets
25    Colorado Avalanche
26    Philadelphia Flyers
27    Washington Capitals
28    Florida Panthers
29    Columbus Blue Jackets
30    Buffalo Sabres