235.
This is the reasonable prediction for the number of goals the Vancouver Canucks will score in 2012, put forth by Thomas Drance in his first over at Pass it To Bulis (As much as it pains me to give Harrison clicks, sincere Congrats to Thom for the gig.)
A good chunk of effort into those predictions and took many things into consideration: Ice-time, games played, career shooting percentages and basically shut himself off from the world for a week to answer my question posited in an earlier Noon Number: "How will the Canucks score 248 goals this year?")
He came up with 235. Now, before you go through and point out that Cody Hodgson is only slated to have four goals this year and therefore every single prediction is going to be a horrible, horrible mistake, keep in mind he worked with the information he had at the time. Add four shootout goals to the 235 tally and the Canucks will score 239 this season. It's a good expectation, the team will have five 20-goal scorers which is something they accomplished back in 2010, and even Andrew Alberts is slated to score one.
Now, many things can change, of course. Players can go into un-predictable hot- or cold-streaks, the team could make a trade or Alberta premier-designate Alison Redford could sign a law when she takes office tomorrow banning all Swedish twins from the province. But 235 works out. 239 when you add on four "shootout-winner" tallies that are kept as part of the official NHL "goals for" and "against" record on the standings.
Now, you all remember your Pythagorean Expectation. I hope you brought your calculator, because I want you to square 262 and divide it by the square of 262 plus the square of 185. That gives you the Canucks expected winning percentage from last season. Multiply that by 82 games, and you have just over 54 wins (the Canucks actually got 54). Tack on ten points to account for overtime losses and the Canucks "expected" point total was 119, just two higher than the actual total of 117.
The number of points a team needs to be first in its conference is a little over 109. 239 goals for and 200 goals against, as I predicted in the post earlier this week, would put the Canucks at 106.5 (conveniently what Bodog set the over/under at). To get a little over 109 points required to win the conference, Vancouver would need to concede no more than 193 goals if Thom's predictions are close to the real result.