With the hockey world at large relocating from sandy beaches to refrigerated practice facilities, it’s time for that hotly anticipated pre-training camp tradition: NHL standings predictions.

The deluge of conference breakdowns and “Players To Watch” features has already begun. The Hockey News Yearbook was delivered in August, and the league’s website kicked off their “31 in 31” series weeks ago. Now, even The Athletic’s own resident stat analyst Dom Luszczyszyn is getting in on the fun.

Season projections, whether opinion-based or grounded in the numbers, go a long way toward providing fans with reasonable expectations for their teams. Hockey is an unpredictable game, but generally the experts are in the ballpark when it comes to forecasting future performance of most teams.

But I’m not convinced the 2017-18 Philadelphia Flyers qualify as “most teams.”

Let’s look at the Flyers’ rivals – the Pittsburgh Penguins – for comparison’s sake. Sure, the Penguins have their question marks. The team doesn’t really have a third-line center with Nick Bonino and Matt Cullen gone. Kris Letang’s injury history remains a concern. Matt Murray will be forced to carry the entire goaltending load for the first time in his young career now that Marc-Andre Fleury has moved on to become the face of the Vegas Golden Knights.

But Pittsburgh can be confident that Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin will remain star-level talent. They can bank on Phil Kessel scoring 60 points, Patric Hornqvist creating positive on-ice outcomes and chipping in with 40 to 50 points of his own, and general competency from defensemen like Brian Dumoulin, Justin Schultz and Olli Maatta. The Penguins have a core driving the bus whose production is easy to project, because they have a long and consistent track record of doing just that.

Who on this Flyers team is easy to project?

Wayne Simmonds is good for 30 goals and middling play-driving metrics at 5-on-5, so there’s one. Sean Couturier will be an advanced stat darling and score around 40 points while thrilling and infuriating equal sections of the Flyers’ fanbase. Michael Raffl and Matt Read should drive positive outcomes at even strength but won’t score much. Radko Gudas will continue to post strong advanced metrics, and Andrew MacDonald will keep delivering bad ones.

Beyond those six players, the rest of the roster is full of question marks.

“Most teams” can depend on their highest paid players for a predictable baseline of production. But on the Flyers, two of the biggest unknowns entering the season are the statuses of their stars.

Claude Giroux’s basic and advanced metrics have sagged dramatically over the past two seasons, and he’s far from the point-per game player he was back in 2013-14. But a bounceback isn’t impossible to imagine, especially accounting for the fact that Giroux played through injury in 2015-16 and then felt the aftereffects of surgery last year. A rebound to 70 points or more is certainly plausible.

By the same token, Giroux could simply be in rapid decline. And to make matters worse, the power play that the Philadelphia captain used to generate the bulk of his points is now demonstrably weaker due to the offseason trade of Brayden Schenn. If Giroux’s power-play production drops off and his 5-on-5 scoring fails to rebound, what is his floor? 50 points? Even lower?

Jakub Voracek is also coming off a rare down year by play-driving metrics and failed to bounce back in terms of point production after an injury ravaged second half of 2015-16. Voracek, 28, is entering the generally accepted “decline years” for NHL forwards. Was last year just random variance, or the start of a steady dropoff in true talent level?

Then, there are the rookies. Even stat models have trouble projecting their future performance, as Luszczyszyn admitted last week when introducing his series. The Flyers will have at least three rookies in their opening day lineup, with four likely and as many as six possible. That’s as much as 26 percent of the Philadelphia roster with essentially no NHL track record.

2017 second overall pick Nolan Patrick was viewed as a potential NHL superstar as recently as 18 months ago, and should be fully healthy entering camp after playing at around 75 percent capacity all of last season in the WHL. Oskar Lindblom was one of the top forwards in the third or fourth-best professional hockey league in the world last season.

Both of these players could be above-average NHL players from Day One. They could also struggle with the transition, or not even make the team at all. The range of possible outcomes is enormous.

In the same vein, the Philadelphia defense could be above-average for the first time in years, if the rookie additions (likely two of Samuel Morin, Robert Hagg, Travis Sanheim and Philippe Myers) come in and immediately prove capable of driving play at even strength. All four certainly have the natural talent to do just that. But there’s no guarantee they will ever showcase that ability, let alone in their freshman campaigns.

Ivan Provorov and Travis Konecny, both 20 years old entering the season, may take major steps forward in their second seasons. But neither graded out as difference makers by advanced metrics in their rookie years, even if Provorov did have the excuse of primarily being paired with Andrew MacDonald at even strength. Dramatic improvements are plausible for both sophomores, but they also could easily just tread water for another season, as neither is close to his age-related prime yet.

Even the role players further down the lineup are difficult to project. Valtteri Filppula and Jori Lehtera are pass-first centers who have spent recent years glued to two of the best snipers in hockey (Steven Stamkos for Filppula, Vladimir Tarasenko for Lehtera). Now, on a team lacking in pure shooters, it’s easy to imagine them struggling to find a fit – or thriving due to less responsibility in a decreased role.

Shayne Gostisbehere and Dale Weise had down seasons in 2016-17 from a scoring standpoint, but both drove play at career-high levels. Can they combine a rebound to their historical scoring efficiency with the strong performances by Corsi (on-ice shot attempt differential at 5v5) that they recently flashed?

Then there’s Jordan Weal, who might have the widest outcome range of any lock for the roster. In 23 NHL games last season, Weal performed at the level of an elite NHL forward, both in terms of 5-on-5 scoring and on-ice outcomes. He doesn’t even need to improve to be a gamechanger for the Flyers. But prior to his impressive late-season performance, Weal was looking like an AHL/NHL tweener, and it’s not out of the question that his standing in the organization could revert back to that level with an unimpressive start to the season.

That’s quite a lot of Philadelphia Flyers with wide-ranging outcomes. And I didn’t even bring up the goaltenders, the recurring bane of a Flyers fan’s existence.

This is not a team with a stable core that allows for high-variance role players to drive whether their end-of-season results are mediocre vs. good, or good vs. great. Instead, Philadelphia is a club with a few stable players and lots of high-variance ones, from the stars all the way down to the goalies.

The good news for Flyers fans is that if everything breaks right – a healthy Giroux is again an impact player, Voracek isn’t in decline, the rookies look great, the sophomores progress – it’s not difficult to envision Philadelphia having a season like the one that the Columbus Blue Jackets had in 2016-17. Theoretically, this could be the deepest Flyers team since the one that led the Eastern Conference for much of the 2010-11 season.

Alternatively, this season could end up very ugly. Giroux, Filppula and Lehtera might prove to be cooked as positive even-strength contributors. The rookies may not be as good as fans desperately want to believe they are. Philadelphia’s goaltending could plausibly be a mess, since the depth chart does consist of a 32-year-old coming off a poor season and the netminder who posted the league’s worst save percentage of anyone with at least 25 appearances in 2016-17.

If a time traveler from April of 2018 appeared and told me that the Flyers finished with 105 points this season, I would not bat an eye. And if said person informed me that the team actually finished in the sub-80 point range, that would not shock me either.

In a way, it’s what should make the 2017-18 season so intriguing for Flyers fans. More than half of the players on the roster are either entering key developmental years, or are approaching career crossroads. It’s that unpredictability which keeps fans engaged and hopeful that better days could be ahead, while still bracing for the possibility of disaster.

Try not to blame the prognosticators who end up leaning towards the pessimistic side of the fence, Flyers fans. Just remember that, for this team, unfriendly preseason projections are far from a death sentence.