ECL 8 Elite: Power Rankings - Week 2

Hello NHLGamers,

For this season of ECL Elite we are tweaking the recurring segment that looks to detail the ‘hottest’, ‘coldest’ and… ‘mildest’? teams in Elite over the past week. There will be more of an emphasis towards the quantitative approach, so expect more graphs and fewer walls of text. Each article in this series will be released on Mondays and will thusly be based on the days in between each power ranking iteration. In addition to this it should be noted that each ranking will invariably be in some way biased as it is, at the end of the day, a subjective list. Note: Each article will be based off of results starting from the Monday, all the way up to (& including) Friday. Ergo, any games played over the weekend will generally end up being a week 'late' so to speak. 

The logic behind the ranking is admittedly a sort of internal subjective ranking that weighs up results, opposition 'strength' as well as thoughts on the general play during some games. As such a ranking is not 100% quantifiable in nature there will be some bias that creeps in. One thing I would like to make abundantly clear however is that points are not the be all and end all within these rankings; for instance, just because 3 teams have the same record does not mean they won't be ranked wildly differently, as the context behind said results are of great importance and simply cannot be understated. 

Previous rankings:

Week 1

Week 2

-

1. Written in the Stars (8-0-0)

2. Almost Famous (7-1-0)

3. Deadly Phantoms HC (3-2-1)

4. FILADELPHIA (6-3-1)

5. Dynasty (6-2-0)

6. Butterfly Effect (2-2-0)

7. Rusty Blades (3-1-0)

8. Team Frosty (3-2-1)

9. Symphony (4-0-0)

10. AIK Hockey (1-4-1)

11. Synergy Hockey (3-3-0)

12. Unlucky Boys HC (1-5-0)

13. Northern Stars (1-4-3)

14. Bucketeers (1-3-0)

15. Resurrection (2-3-1)

16. HC Wildcard (1-9-0)

Standings Timeline

*The "playoff cut-off point", as well as the "relegation zone" lines are rough estimations of where the respective areas of Elite will fall once the regular season has been wrapped up. So, in other words, if a team is able to get over the green line, they 'should' stand a very good chance of making the playoffs, whilst if a team cannot make it past the red line, then there is a good chance that they will have to fight a relegation battle in order to assure their Elite spot for next season. 

Analysis

Two weeks in and we are beginning to see some stratification at long last. I suppose, the elephant in the room would be Written just straight curb-stomping everyone and, well, what is there to say really? In fact, to summarise how ridiculous their start has been, if they decided to fall off the rails (relatively) and merely finished the season at a sedentary 1PT/G pace, they would end up with the same amount of points as they did last season. 

As for the mortals, aF has gone on a pretty strong run recently (7-1-0), potentially going a long way towards punching their first playoff berth in Elite. In addition to this, Dynasty have undergone a resurgence of sorts, climbing into the upper echelons after a fairly dismal first week. Joining them are Team Frosty and FILA who trail just behind them. 

On the flip side however, we can quite plainly see that HC Wildcard, Northern Stars & Unlucky Boys have flatlined with no recourse in sight. It is of course early, with us being ~1/3 of the way into the season for the most part, nevertheless, going on extended losing streaks at any time in the season can be especially deadly for playoff ambitions, especially with Elite looking like everyone can beat everyone (sans Written) for some inane reason. 

Projection

Missing from last week due to time constraints were a pair of 'features', namely a projection and a prediction. The projection looks to, well, project where a team will finish based off of all the games they have played thus far. 

Prediction (Missing from last week)

The second feature that was absent was a prediction of where the teams will fall once the dust has settled at the end of this season. Unlike the projection, the data used to assign points in the graphic below did not come from this ongoing season, instead it came from collating previous season results for each team (if possible), as well as some user bias to bring it all together. Think of this as similar to the 16 in 16  baseline (Week 0) we used in ECL 7.

--

And with that, we can now conclude the second edition of ECL 8 Elite's power rankings. Hopefully next week we will see the stratification continue so that we can pick out any further trends with ease. 

ECL Elite Writer

@MartindalexC