The Shooting in the Dark Industry
I greatly appreciate my bloggermate Orderedchaos' initial survey of preseason prediction silliness. Outside of Entertainment Tonight, there can be little in this world as vacuous and vapid as "experts" engaged in summertime "prognosticating" about the performance of sports teams.
I'm a college football enthusiast, and there are at least a half dozen published preseason magazines on newsstands this month, all offering specific rankings for all 117 D-I college football teams. Each team has 85 scholarship players, with approximately 20 graduating and 20 newly arriving each season. Many returning players markedly remake their bodies over the offseason with increasingly sophisticated and effective physique-altering training regimens. They also mature. There are, additionally, widespread personnel changes among the ranks of teams' assistant coaches every offseason.
All of these publications have their preseason forecasts put to bed long before players report for physicals for fall camp. In short, the variables of change in college football are staggeringly enormous from season to season, and yet few of them are reflected in these "forecasts." Still, the editors of these magazines would have you believe that from their New York offices they can accurately, magically divine the fates of nearly 10,000 football players scattered across the country, most of whom they've never seen play.
It is with the same skeptical, dismissive eye that we ought to weigh NHL forecasts offered up in summer. These endeavors are franchises of fraud. That Sports Illustrated could label the '05-'06 Carolina Hurricanes a lottery loser and then watch them go on to hoist Lord Stanley seven months later should forever preclude the magazine from forecasting again. There's getting it wrong and then there's blindfolded dart-throwing. In the case of the '05-'06 NHL season, dart throwing would have aided SI.
Now to be fair, the league had been shut down the preceding season by the lockout. But even in the instances of uninterrupted competition, across sports, these forecasts are exercises in little more than slickly marketed, superficial guesswork. And they are unified in their being reliably wrong. They exist because they exploit the sports fans' enduring and insatiable thirst to know what will lie ahead for their heroes. And they are partly fueled by the troubling intersection of modern sports and high-stakes gambling (on- and off line). The fantastic popularity of fantasy sports participation has also mushroomed the popularity of the forecasting industry.
As mindless diversion for beach chair reading, they do no real harm. But they take on a larger-than-life credibility as their rankings and rationales are echoed about message boards and blogs and picked up and regurgitated by the electronic editions of mainstream media outlets. Hockey in particular ranks among the most difficult of sports to forecast; it is why there's so little action on it in Vegas. How do you wager on or forecast a goalie standing on his head? On some nights, you know, Kerry Fraser doesn't bring his best evaluative acumen to the sheet.
The Capitals, a few early prognosticators have weighed in upon, will make only modest improvement in the standings this season over the previous two. They will miss the postseason again, we are told.
Such assessments can only be premised on this variable: the team's free agents signings were nice or decent but not on the order of rink shattering. But no one can know how Nicklas Backstrom will adjust to hockey in North America on the smaller sheet and over 80-plus games in his rookie season. The difference between his notching say 47 points versus 67 points almost certainly determines the team's playoff viability, but who is confidently able to tell us which tally will prove true?
Who among the soothsayers knows how much if at all the team is improved in the shootout? Will Kolzig hold up and perform at an elite level for at least say 65 games? And certainly the team's young blueline must have been judged in a development vacuum, within which none of Steve Eminger, Milan Jurcina, Shaone Morrisonn, and Mike Green could appreciably improve over a year ago . . . else, joined by the improvements up front, the team would have to seriously flirt with the postseason, if not outright qualify.
Hockey, too, has its future shrouded in a marvelous mystery of the unknown impact delivered from abroad. Raise your hand if last summer you saw 40 goals in Alexander Semin's 2006-07 arsenal. You probably had Petr Prucha down for 30 in his rookie season on Broadway, too. It is North American media offering up these rigid preseason assessments, none with any notion of what impact virtually every team will enjoy from its new imports.
Hockey prose is fine for inclusion in any Labor Day beach reading list, just know that if it's marketed as new season forecast, it's fiction.
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