Quote:
Originally Posted by Jason14h
Where does that finals rank ? 117 point team against a 115 point team ? Pre shootouts !
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Iain Fyffe once ranked the best NHL teams of all time based on ‘winning percentage z-score’ – the number of standard deviations that each team was above the league mean for that particular season. The reasoning was that when there were a lot of really bad teams to score points off, it was easier to put up a flashy record, and when there was a lot of parity in the league, it was harder. Using the standard deviation corrects for that. Parity in the NHL was near an all-time high in '88-89 – the 3rd-place team had 92 points, the last-place team 61 – and then there were those two giants, Calgary and Montreal, almost as far ahead of 3rd place as that was ahead of 21st.
In the aggregate z-scores, the '88-89 Flames were the second-best team of all time, and the '88-89 Habs were third. I think it's safe to say that there has never been another SCF in which two teams that good were that evenly matched.