The 2006-07 NHL season was the Nashville Predators’ best regular season. With Tomáš Vokoun in goal and great players like Paul Kariya, Jason Arnott, and Steve Sullivan up front, the team set a franchise record with 110 points. Now, eleven years later, the Predators have a pretty good team once again. Will this team finally be the one to surpass the ’06-07 team and earn at least 111 points?
So far this season, the Preds have played 55 games and earned 77 points. This is 70% of the possible points and puts them on pace to accumulate 114.8 points in the full 82-game season. That should give us some hope that this team could set a new record for points in a season.
We can also use simulations to predict which outcomes are most likely. Fortunately, we don’t have to conduct our own simulations. Instead, we can borrow data from the results of the nightly simulations conducted by Sports Club Stats. Every night, they simulate the remainder of the NHL schedule over 1 billion times to estimate each team’s chances of making the playoffs. According to their results, the Preds have a 59.4% chance of getting at least 111 points. Again, this is quite encouraging!
Let’s conclude with a simple plot that shows the rate at which the team has acquired points and compare it to the pace they need to keep to hit 111. Despite a slow start to the season and a brief slump during the holidays, the team has been acquiring points at a sufficient pace to finally break their franchise record.
