A great source of hockey information that you won't find anywhere else can be found at The Hockey Rodent. The Hockey Rodent's owner/writer is not only a diehard Ranger fan, but IMHO, also has a very original way of looking at hockey. That's not to say those two qualities (one could argue that being a Blueshirt fan is not necessarily a "quality"; to you I say, "Isles suck".) are mutually exclusive, but rarely do I find them occuring simultaneously. Maybe I just don't get out enough. Insightful analysis, irreverent commentary and always spot-on from game to game / shift to shift; if you want Ranger hockey broken down into the X's, O's, & #'s, The Hockey Rodent is where you need to be.

Now that the obligatory butt-kissing is out of the way, the point of this post was to point you all towards his informative (blog?) site, where his berthWatch is up as the NHL playoffs draw near. How he arrives at his numbers is somewhat explained here but if your eyes start glossing when you see this "1/(1-.015) • 1/(1-.0175) • 1/(1-.924) • 1/(1-.925) = .797", or at the mere mention of "binomial expansion", just skip the latter link, click the former and get right to the pretty colors and predictive percentages. If you don't care about all the numbers he's used to arrive at his berthWatch predictions, you will care that the Rangers are in a great position (87.4%) to make the playoffs. While you're there, check out his "real" links on the left side-bar. Good Stuff.

All those numbers reminds me of the NHL ranking system that I came up with for our annual NHL fantasy draft. As SteveW can attest, I had more fun coming up with the formulas than I did during each season. I stunk. I trust the Rodent's numbers more than my own.