“85% accuracy, y’all.” Photo by Matthias S., via Wikimedia Commons.

The first round has come and gone, and as we expected before a game had been played, brackets were not going to be fun for everyone. Most people leaning on statistical models saw their brackets chewed up by the vagaries of the playoff sample; SAP, if you’ll remember, hailed their overfit model and its “prediction” of 85% of the past 15 years of playoff series — and proceeded to do no better than a coin flip (they missed all the Eastern teams, and got all the Western matchups). An exception to the #fancystats slaughter was Nicholas Emptage, who went 6-2, which is a good thing if your site is called Puck Prediction. Not even Nicholas was a match for the gut of Steve Simmons, though, who went 8-0 in the first round. It’s the Simmons Hockey League, y’all, and he’s just sliding into our DMs.

But the big question is how our brackets, built on the tried and tested virtues of truculence, size, and experience, fared in this ultimate battle of wits and twits?

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Uploaded by “ali”, via Wikimedia Commons; altered by author

I don’t like to predict the playoffs, in part because it makes plenty of people look like geniuses that probably aren’t, and makes geniuses look pretty dumb. And really, that’s because the stakes are high but the influence of luck is pretty drastic — not surprising when a team can advance by only winning 4 of 7 (i.e. barely successful enough to make the playoffs in the first place). Lastly, given a flood of predictions and contests in the wake of the Summer of Analytics, nobody who “wins” their predictions is going to look a lot better than the other person who almost “won.” So I’m exercising my right to fart around.

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