BoA and LT will cover game-day stuff better than I; this simply seemed like a reasonable excuse to post the information I’ve been promising for a couple of days on preseason success and why it doesn’t mean shit.

Last week, Ender jokingly suggested to me that maybe the Oilers’ losing was a good thing, because preseason success seemed to be a harbinger of regular season failure, and vice versa. It was a fun thought, and certainly, one look at the 2006 preseason should tell you where that idea comes from. On the other hand, it seemed a bit illogical: surely there shouldn’t be any relation at all between pre- and regular season results, should there? I mean, the good teams will probably still be good, and the bad teams will probably still be bad, but there’s a lot of room for slosh in a sample of only 5-8 games: the Oilers have started many a season firing on all cylinders in October and November before coming back to Earth in January, while the Flames have started all three post-lockout years with their skates tied together, and made the playoffs every time, winning the division in 2005-06.

It wasn’t an idea that I gave much further thought to until Tuesday night, when the Oilers got clubbed 4-0 by the Flames, and did so while looking pretty much like total shit the whole way through. So I decided to see if there was anything to this idea, and grabbed the last three years’ preseason data, fired that into Excel with the regular season standings, and checked to see what came out of the wash.

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