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On Boxing Day, the Golden Knights hoist the 5th-best points percentage in the NHL. The road has felt a bit bumpier, though, because they’ve won just the 20th most games of any team.
The most important question, however, is not what has happened in the past, but what may happen moving forward.
We have several methods to help us gather clues, and when they all point in the same direction, as they do, it’s typically a good sign of what’s to come.
First, a look at one of the newer projection models from HockeyStats.com. It currently shows the Golden Knights with a 98% chance to make the playoffs and a 9% chance to win the Stanley Cup. They predict Vegas to win the Pacific by a fairly wide margin while still finishing a whopping 20 points behind Colorado.
Maybe the most interesting part of their model is that it projects the Golden Knights to fall a bit short of their current pace. 44 points in 35 games extrapolates to about 103 points over the full season, but they predict VGK come up a bit short, landing on 101.
MoneyPuck.com’s numbers are similar. They have the Golden Knights as 54.4% favorites to win the Pacific with a projection of 101.5 points, like HockeyStats, six points clear of Edmonton. VGK’s Cup chances are similar at 8.7% and playoff odds are a near lock at 96.3%.
The Athletic’s Dom Luszczyszyn is the most bullish on the Golden Knights. His overall team rating system has VGK as the 3rd best team in the NHL with top-5 ratings in both offense and defense. The model predicts Vegas plays extremely well over the next 47 games, amassing 64 points for a season total of 108.
This projection gives VGK a greater than 99% chance to make the playoffs, an incredible 23% chance to reach the Cup Final, and a 13% chance to win it all for the second time in four seasons.
Finally, the other side of the coin is Hockey-Reference.com’s predictions. The strictly statistically based simulations expect the Golden Knights to finish short of 100 points at 98. That gives them just an 88% chance to make the playoffs, but VGK remain sizable favorites to win the division at 42% compared to Anaheim’s 25% and Edmonton’s 21%.
Where these numbers don’t like Vegas are in their chances to win the Cup. Not only do they have the lowest percentage chance of all models, at 3.8%, but they are actually lower than the Ducks, who sit at 4.9%. In positive news, in at least one of the 1,000 simulations they ran, the Golden Knights finished with 116 points, meaning they’d play at a .766 points percentage the rest of the way.
In the end, every single one of these predictions will probably be wrong. But, it’s better to have the models on your side than against you.
