Who's On Top?
- Kjell Anderson
- Oct 11, 2022
- 2 min read
Power Rankings
In a league as large as the #MAHL, it is hard to know how teams stack up against the rest of the competition. Taking notes from a comparable league in terms of size, the MAHL decided to go with media rankings to decide the top 25 teams in all of the Minnesota Amateur Hockey League. A group of writers from local newspapers post their own rankings of the top 25 teams in their opinion. These rankings are then given points (1st=25 pts, 25th=1pt) and added up. The teams are then re-ranked in order of most points to least, giving us our official top 25. These rankings are decided at the conclusion of the regular season and prior to the playoffs starting. The rankings play a vital part in the playoff setup, with teams being seeded directly based on their ranking. This continues after the regional playoffs, once the final 16 advance to the Super Series, they are re-seeded based on their rankings.
MAHL Analysts
There is a select group of sports writers that have been selected as official MAHL Analysts and are responsible for ranking the top 25 teams in the #MAHL. There are 11 people registered as MAHL Analysts, though not every Analyst makes their rankings every year. I honestly came up with the idea for Analysts by trying to find a way to include people who actively follow the #MAHL on ahsports.boardhost.com. I had been doing the rankings myself for several years and thought it would be more authentic if multiple people made rankings and they were averaged out. I made a post seeing if anyone would be interested and we ended up with 11 Analysts. Each Analyst created an identity as a sports writer from a newspaper within the MAHL’s footprint. There are Analysts in St. Paul, Minneapolis, New Ulm, Superior, St. Cloud, Winona, Richfield and more. It is a lot of fun to see which teams get ranked really high or get disrespected by different Analysts when I go through to make the final power rankings.
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