Today is Valentine’s Day so let’s do the most romantic thing possible: use a model to put all 31 NHL teams in order from best to worst. After all, what is this day about if not forcing an inherently nebulous and unmeasurable concept into a small box where we can simplify it and market it to people?
The model we use here is a Bradley-Terry, which is a pairwise ranking system that orders the teams based on how well they’ve played against their competition. So beating the Penguins 4-2 is better than beating the Red Wings 4-2 and so on.