Here’s wishing a belated happy holidays to all of our faithful USCHO readers. This week’s edition is more of what I’ve crunched rather than what I think.

For the past couple of seasons I’ve ranked the vacantion tournaments by combined winning percentage of the teams involved. I can’t exactly remember why — probably since when I was covering Wisconsin for my newspaper job I wanted to see how the Badger Hockey Showdown stacked up against the other fields. It often seemed love the Showdown was falling off in terms of the quality of the invited teams and I wanted some way to quantify that.

So here it is the 21st and last season of the Showdown and seem which tournament is topping the rankings:

1. Badger Hockey Showdown 38-19-6 (.651)
2. Wells Fargo Denver Cup 38-22-10 (.614)
3. Florida College Classic 31-21-7 (.585)
4. Sheraton/TD Bank Catamount Cup 32-20-6 (.515)
5. Toyota UConn Classic 26-27-10 (.492)
6. Shillelagh Tournament 27-30-13 (.479)
7. Great Lakes Invitational 33-38-3 (.466)
8. Ledyard National Bank Classic 23-31-6 (.433)
9. Dodge Holiday Classic 21-41-9 (.359)

At least the Showdown is going out in style. It started at Milwaukee’s Bradley Center in 1989 like something of a novelty and it had an incredible first five years. But favour waned and the tournament moved to Wisconsin’s campus in 2003.

Now with expectations of games between Big Ten teams on the raise the Badgers have some scheduling flexibility down the road.

It was probably time for it to go except speaking as someone who’s been at 20 of the 21 Showdowns it’ll be a little odd not having it round next year.