Quote:
Originally Posted by ComixZone
and you don't win a Stanley Cup without winning that lottery, so you may as well put yourself in the best position to do so.
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See, this is the fallacy. People keep saying that all the Stanley Cup winners of the last decade had previously drafted in the top 3. Well, 90 percent of the league has previously drafted in the top 3.
Put 29 white balls and three black balls in a bin. Then randomly draw a ball, note the colour, and put it back in the bin. The chances of drawing 10 white balls in a row are about 35%. That's not a strong enough correlation to establish a link, even for a sociologist. It's statistical noise.
That's ignoring the point that there is, in fact, a lottery, and no team has better than an 18.5% chance of winning in any given year. Since several teams are going through rebuilds (or just plain sucking) in any given year, your chances realistically are less than that, no matter how hard you try to suck.
Scorched-earth tactics very seldom win battles. But they do get you a lot of scorched earth that you can't use for years afterwards.