I'm sure most of you have run into the Pythag Expectation as a baseball stat; for the uninitiated, it correlates runs scored and runs allowed with expected winning percentage.  It's not entirely precise, but it is a handy metric to gauge if a particular team is winning (or losing) more than their actual performance might warrant.

I have searched in vain for a similar formula in hockey.

Do any of you know of something I've missed?  If so, please leave in the comments.

In a similar vein, I am not quite sure what stats are and are not predictive in hockey.  I vaguely remember hearing that shot differential is predictive, but Google searches have not yielded me anything meaty here.  Is goal differential predictive, similar to baseball?  Can't find anything that corroborates or dismisses that.

Again, if you know of any prior work in this vein, please leave us a link in the comments.

If there's nothing out there, I might try to carve out a little time to mess around with some numbers to see if there's a simple formula that will correlate.  If I get that motivated, I'll of course share the results here.

Thanks,

FD