Many years back, Tom Tango devised a forecasting system to project different statistics in baseball. He named the system “The Marcel the Monkey Forecasting System,” as it is one of the most basic forecasting systems. However, basic doesn’t mean inaccurate; advanced models have not made substantial improvements over Marcel’s in baseball analytics. To demonstrate this, Henry Druschel of SB Nation’s Beyond the Box Score created the following table to evaluate how prominent forecasting systems fared in their 2016 MLB projections.



Table 1. Mean Absolute Error for Baseball’s Forecasting Systems for the 2016 Season



There have been a number of attempts at adapting Marcel projections for hockey. Using a similar methodology to Tango’s original model, we can use Marcels to project scoring for each Red Wings’ player for the 2017-2018 season.



What is a Marcel Projection?



Simply put, Marcel projections are...