PWHL Power Rankings: How We’re Predicting Results for the Brand New League
PWHL Power Rankings: How We’re Predicting Results for the Brand New League
All season long, we’ll be tracking how each PWHL team's ranking rises and falls based on its on-ice results.
Welcome to the inaugural edition of The Messenger’s PWHL power rankings! In this space, we’ll be ranking each team in the brand-new women’s hockey league using Elo ratings, a statistical system that tracks team quality over time based on its results, adjusted for scoring margins, game locations and the strength of its opponents. Here are the current rankings after the first handful of games:
Before we get to highlighting some of the performances driving these early rankings, let’s talk a little more about Elo ratings. The Elo system was invented by a Hungarian-American physics professor and chess enthusiast named Árpád Élő, and originally designed to rank competitive chess players. (The FIDE — the international chess federation — still uses a version of Elo ratings to rank players today.) Its beauty comes in its flexibility — it can be adapted for any competition that has head-to-head results, including hockey — and its mathematical elegance — in any game, both teams are assigned a win probability based on the difference in pregame ratings, with the winner gaining Elo points from the loser in proportion to how unlikely the result was.
This makes Elo a ranking system that self-balances over time: If a team is rated too high and gets upset, it loses a lot of points as Elo tries to zero in on the team’s true quality.
But there are, of course, challenges when adapting ratings to a new league like the PWHL — namely, that we have no pre-existing sense of how good each team is, aside from guesses based on how individual players performed in the precursor leagues to the PWHL. So we set each team to a rating of 1500 (the typical average Elo rating for a competition) before the first games and let the results shape the rankings from there. (We’re also making some very rough assumptions that women’s hockey will generally follow the same conventions as the men’s game in terms of home-ice advantage and how quickly the ratings should update based on new information. We’ll check in on those as the season goes on.)
With all of that said, Minnesota has risen to No. 1 in the first batch of power rankings, thanks to a trio of wins over Boston, Montreal and Toronto by a combined margin of 9 goals to 3. (If you’re keeping score at home, that means Minnesota has already beaten three of five possible opponents in the PWHL within the first 10 days of the league existing.) Forwards Grace Zumwinkle and Taylor Heise have combined for 7 goals and 8 points in three games, forming a dominant duo that has powered nearly the team’s entire offense, while goalies Nicole Hensley and Maddie Rooney have stopped 88 of 91 shots (96.7%) so far.
The rest of the rankings follow the standings in descending order of wins and points, with one exception — Toronto ranks last despite notching a win over New York last Friday. The biggest reason why: Toronto lost 4-0 at home in the New Year’s Day season opener, which is the costliest loss of the young season in terms of Elo points. Aside from Sarah Nurse, Toronto is struggling to score — they’re last in the league in goals per game (1.3) — but their star power and experience should help them bolster their Elo as the season goes on.
According to Elo, the best upcoming game of the week will be on Sunday, when No. 1 Minnesota hosts No. 3 New York. As much credit as we gave above to Zumwinkle and Heise for their role in Minnesota’s scoring attack, we have to also hype up New York’s top scorers as well: Between Alex Carpenter, Ella Shelton, Jessie Eldridge and Chloe Aurard, New York has four of the league’s top eight scorers (including ties) on the season so far — including its highest-scoring defender in Shelton. Even with the caveat that Boston and Ottawa have only played one game apiece so far, making it difficult for one-third of the league to rise up and compete with Minnesota and New York’s stars on those leaderboards, Sunday’s game should be a great showcase for some of the most talented players in the PWHL.
Alex Azzi contributed editing.