Quote:
Originally Posted by PaperBagger'14
I mean, you could look at the Islanders as of late. Your view is stupid
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What about the Islanders? A single example doesn't invalidate a general rule, especially when you can't even be arsed to say what it is an example of.
Look, here is my argument:
1. The variation within each hockey game attributable to luck is greater than that attributable to skill. Even the best teams lose about a quarter of their games, sometimes by lopsided scores. Even the worst teams win about a quarter of theirs.
2. Luck tends to even out in the long run. An 82-game sample size is enough for the quality of the team to show much more strongly than the luck within any single game.
3. Seven games is not a long run. A 4- to 7-game sample is
not enough for the quality of the team to outweigh the factor of chance. The worst team in the playoffs will sometimes beat the best team in the playoffs in a seven-game series.
In baseball, which has been analysed a lot more than hockey, I am assured by statisticians that the worst team in MLB – not just the worst playoff team – will win three out of five against the best team about 15 percent of the time. Hockey is a lower-scoring game, so the effect of a single lucky goal is correspondingly larger. A quick bit of Google-fu tells me that if Team A has a 70 percent chance of beating Team B in any one game – an unlikely spread between two playoff teams, as only the very best teams win 70 percent of their games in a full schedule, including games against bottom-feeders – there is
still about a
13 percent chance that Team B will win four out of seven.
4. If you want to judge the GM's performance, and not simply the luck of the team, you need to base your judgement on the larger sample size.
We've seen extreme examples of luck in both directions in just the last three years. I repeat: The Tampa Bay Lightning, the best-managed and best-constructed team in the league, were swept in the first round with the same core that went on to win two straight championships. The Montreal Canadiens, with questionable management and a weak roster, after a season in which they lost more games than they won, hit a lucky streak and made it to the Stanley Cup finals.
If you were to judge the GM by playoff results, you'd have wanted to fire Julien BriseBois after his first year on the job and gut the team that won the President's Trophy. Fortunately for the Lightning, their owners are not that foolish. You'd also think the Canadiens were run by geniuses, which, I am sad to say, DeluxeMoustache actually appears to believe.
I am not defending Brad Treliving here. I believe he has used up all his rope and should probably have been fired by now,
based on his teams' performance in the regular season. I put no stock in the fact that the Flames fluked into a second-round appearance once, nor that they bombed out against Colorado in a series they were widely predicted to win. Those things happen all the time in a best-of-seven playoff format.
Now explain to me which of the above points is stupid.