How the forecast works

Every forecast is only as strong as the data behind it. The foundation is years of Liiga history, gathered, compiled, and arranged through careful selection: season by season stats for skaters and goalies, full team rosters, final standings, transfers between clubs and leagues, and the result of every game played. Substantial time and effort go into assembling it into one clean, consistent record before a single forecast is run.

Raw stats do not tell the whole story. A point in a junior league is not worth a point in Liiga. Each player's history is translated into one comparable strength number, using published league equivalency research and recency weighting, then combined into a team power projection for forwards, defense and goaltending. This is the number that ends up on the player card. One rule runs through it all: only what was known before a game is ever used to describe that game.

At the heart of the system is one model answering a single question: given two teams and their strength, who wins, and how likely is it. The approach combines many decision trees and averages them, which keeps it stable on limited data. It learns the pattern from thousands of games with known outcomes, then outputs a probability rather than a guess, because in hockey the underdog wins often enough that any honest forecast has to say so.

A champion is not decided by one game but by a whole season plus playoffs. The full schedule is played out thousands of times. Each game is a weighted coin flip on the model's probability, so every simulated season lands differently. The regular season builds the table, the table seeds the bracket, and the playoffs run Liiga's real format, best-of-five to open, best-of-seven from there, round by round, until one team is left. This is Monte Carlo simulation: repetition captures the real randomness of a season.

The output isn't a single confident pick, it's championship odds: how often each team wins the title across thousands of simulated seasons. The favorite gets named, but so does the chaos underneath it: how open or settled the race really is, whether you like the answer or not.

1. Tappara30.9%
2. JYP16.3%
3. Ilves11.0%

Current forecast, updated 1 September 2026. Title odds; full table on the forecast page.