An open contest for those who want to try to predict the regular season points totals of the 2017-2018 NHL regular season. Throughout the year, from time to time, I will post updated leaderboards. At the end of the season, the winner of the contest will receive several kilograms of sour candy, in addition to the accolades of my witty and urbane twitter followers.

Submission Format

Contestants will submit their predictions in the following format: for every team:

An estimate of their season-ending point total, with one decimal place of precision. An associated uncertainty estimate for that point total, with one decimal place of precision.

Scoring

For example, you might specify a total of 93.2 points for the Senators, with an uncertainty of 1.2 points; a total of 84.0 points for the Leafs, with an uncertainty of 10.9 points, and so on for all thirty-one teams.

For each team, the score associated to a given estimate will be computed as the probability of drawing the actual result, from a normal distribution with mean given by the estimated point total and standard deviation given by the estimated uncertainty. The maximum possible score for a single team is 1, which can only be obtained by specifying the team's point total exactly with an uncertainty of 0---in this case you will score 0 for even the slightest deviation from your estimate. Specifying a larger uncertainty will help you capture some points even when your estimate is poor; speciying a smaller uncertainty will give you a larger score when your estimate is good. The overall score is the sum of the thirty-one team scores, so the maximum theoretical score is thirty-one. (The winner will have a score of much less than thirty-one.) ((Last year's winner had a score of 1.25 out of 30.))