Lucky 13: 20 Games In (Updated With Standings)

With one quarter of the season now in the rear view mirror, I thought it might be fun to do a quick review of how players have stacked up against our predictions, and which readers and writers have looked the most prescient in the early going.

It turns out that commenter ronaldo has jumped out to an early lead over the field, while Baron Wanye von Gretz IV leads the writers to date.

Since nobody had much faith in either Ryan Jones or Theo Peckham to show up on these lists, what we actually have here are the top 10 Oilers forwards and top five Oilers defencemen.

Five players have the distinct achievement of being on pace for fewer points than the most pessimistic fan on the site predicted them to: Dustin Penner, Tom Gilbert, and Magnus Paajarvi all missed by a relatively modest margin, while Andrew Cogliano is out by 10 points to date and Gilbert Brule has the widest gap in terms of performance vs. expectation, as he’s currently on pace for 12 points and the most pessimistic fan picked 33.

Had the site’s last commenter simply gone one point lower than the most pessimistic choice for each player, he’d be closest to the current pace of all these players. Given that we haven’t even seen significant injuries yet, that’s remarkable.

Given the requests I’ve had, here are some preliminary standings, based on projected points after 20 games. Obviously, there’s a lot of hockey left to be played, so don’t take these too seriously.  Writers are in bold, and scoring rules can be found here.