Oct 17th Smid-Tropp (draw), 1st period. Next goal scored by CBJ. Columbus wins 3-2.
Nov 13th Engellend-Crombeen (win), 1st period. Next two goals scored by Arizona. Flames win 5-3.
Nov 18th Engelland-Jackman (win), 1st period. Next two goals scored by Anaheim. Flames win 4-3 (SO).
Nov 25th Russell-Kesler (loss), 1st period. Next two goals scored by Anaheim. Ducks win 3-2.
Dec 16th Bouma-Glass (loss), 2nd period. Next goal scored by Rangers. Rangers win 5-2.
Dec 20th Engelland-Dorsett (win), 1st period. Next two goals scored by Canucks. Canucks win 3-2 (OT).
Jan 31st Bollig-Aulie (draw), AND Engelland-Gazdic (win), both 1st period. Next goal scored by Oilers. Flames win 4-2.
Feb 14th Colborne-Sbisa (loss), 1st period. Next goal scored by Canucks. Flames win 3-2.
Feb 24th Ferland-Miller (draw), 2nd period. Next goal scored by Rangers. Rangers win 1-0.
Feb 25th Glencross-Zajac (draw), 1st period. Next goal scored by Devils. Flames win 3-1.
Mar 8th Bollig-Borowiecki (win), 1st period. Next two goals scored by Senators. Senators win 5-4 (SO).
We've fought in 19 games this season. 11 times the opponent has scored the next goal, 11 times we've lost the game. Or to put it another way: fighting has nothing to do with it. Just because this time the Flames comeback happened to coincide with Engellands fight is a random occurrance that will inevitably happen a few times over the season if you keep trying it.
Are you arguing that a fight doesn't rally the boys? I didn't say that fight=win. I said fighting will rally the boys, and rallying is a good thing. It may lead to a win, or it may not. If you don't think fighting rallies or fires up the boys, you are wrong chief.
But don't take my word for it, ask Kris Russell:
"Eggo steps up, has a big fight for us, changes the tide"
And let's even say it does spark the team. Why didn't it spark Anaheim?
In part because Engelland beat the crap out of Maroon, and in part because the Ducks already had a lot of energy. Simply by virtue of being as bad as we were to start, the fight gave us a bigger lift. Woke the building up too, which does have a psychological impact.
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In part because Engelland beat the crap out of Maroon, and in part because the Ducks already had a lot of energy. Simply by virtue of being as bad as we were to start, the fight gave us a bigger lift. Woke the building up too, which does have a psychological impact.
Resolute beat me to the punch. Clearly winning a fight when you are down a pair will necessarily give the winning fighters' team the boost.
In part because Engelland beat the crap out of Maroon, and in part because the Ducks already had a lot of energy. Simply by virtue of being as bad as we were to start, the fight gave us a bigger lift. Woke the building up too, which does have a psychological impact.
Psychological impact?
Professional athletes are robots whose attributes can be broken down into quantifiable statistics. Thousands of people screaming does not correlate to winning percentage or good Corsi. I don't see any psychological impact, so it doesn't exist.
Must be luck.
Engelland switching hands and face-pounding Maroon was awesome. My dad and I had just finished having a conversation about the changes in the game since his day. His quote RE: Getzlaf at the beginning of the game "If you had two goals in a game back then, someone was trying to punch your face." Then the fight. We both, the young and the old, stood up and cheered.
It's barbaric, it's dangerous, it arguably has little to no impact on the game and is likely to be completely absent in the next few years. But it is damn good entertainment.
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Are you arguing that a fight doesn't rally the boys? I didn't say that fight=win. I said fighting will rally the boys, and rallying is a good thing. It may lead to a win, or it may not. If you don't think fighting rallies or fires up the boys, you are wrong chief.
But don't take my word for it, ask Kris Russell:
"Eggo steps up, has a big fight for us, changes the tide"
Players have no special powers against false assumptions.
If people commonly believed that a game often changes at the halfway mark of the game, they would easily see lots of examples of this. Doesn't make it real.
Plus you did pretty specifically say that fights always rally the boys. This has actually been studied very thoroughly and there is no evidence of such an effect.
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Players have no special powers against false assumptions.
If people commonly believed that a game often changes at the halfway mark of the game, they would easily see lots of examples of this. Doesn't make it real.
Plus you did pretty specifically say that fights always rally the boys. This has actually been studied very thoroughly and there is no evidence of such an effect.
Ok, let me ask you something and don't take it the wrong way, but have you ever played hockey and been on the bench/ice during a fight? Did it not fire you up in the least?
I've been there and I found that it gives you a boost as a player, and I've heard countless NHLers and coaches say it rallies them. So I stand by my comment saying that it ALWAYS rallies the boys. Evidence be damned.
It may not lead to desired result (a win) but saying it doesn't rally them is wrong.
If the players say the fight turned momentum and it got them going, then it turned the momentum and got them going. Doesn't work all the time, but last night it worked. Therefore, Engelland's fight was the turning point.
I've never understood denying the energizing and/or demoralizing effect of a fight.
Its like anything else in any walk of life, if you see someone go out and step up and go above and beyond the call of duty doesnt that get you going too?
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If you thought this season would have a happy ending, you haven't been paying attention.
Bleh why does the anti fight crowd have to bring this thread down.
Fights energize the building. The building was quiet after 2 quick goals against. Woke up with the fight and momentum changed.
Those fighting stats can prove this if you actually look a little deeper. Flames have won 5 out of 6 of those games where they won the fight at home. You can draw any conclusions you like with small sample sizes like this.
Those fighting stats can prove this if you actually look a little deeper. Flames have won 5 out of 6 of those games where they won the fight at home. You can draw any conclusions you like with small sample sizes like this.
I'm not part of the "anti-fighting" crowd. I enjoy when two players in the heat of the moment get into a brawl. Especially at home.
The problem I think a lot of us have, is "staged" fights. Especially by players who feel they need to fight to justify ice time.
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Doug Gilmour got the nickname 'Killer' because of serial killer Gary Gilmore. I don't want that nickname for Bennett.
Not relevant to the topic at hand (fantastic game, huge win!) but as I read comments related to the potential nickname, I think "Dougie" would be a sweet nickname for Sam Bennett. Tip of the hat to killer himself. And I'm in support of those that suggest he gets #39 in Flames red.
Meh, I'm not really that interested in arguing this, so just a couple of quick points.
If you don't care for hockey fights, you pretty much start ignoring them. IMO if you start ignoring them, the claim that it "changes tides" starts to look very dubious very quickly.
When a fight happens, I generally either use that time to read the internet, go to the bathroom or the kitchen or just skip ahead if I'm watching a recorded game.
When you skip the fights, some things become apparent:
- There is no visible change in the game after a fight
- There is absolutely no way of telling who won the fight by looking at the game
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bandwagon In Flames
Bleh why does the anti fight crowd have to bring this thread down.
It's the "anti-fight crowd bringing the thread down" when you don't like your beliefs challenged.
It's "pro-fighting people wanting jumping at any chance to prove how right they are about fights" if you look at it from the other direction.
It's really equally annoying.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Huntingwhale
If the players say the fight turned momentum and it got them going, then it turned the momentum and got them going. Doesn't work all the time, but last night it worked. Therefore, Engelland's fight was the turning point.
Sometimes I change from the sofa to the bean bag during a game. Doesn't work all the time, but last night it worked.
See how that works?
Obviously you can't prove a negative, so this is one of those talks that really doesn't go anywhere.
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I love how in discussions like this, the issue of confirmation bias only seems to work one way.
Funny that.
You don't have to take my word for anything.
Make a night of it. Get a few friends together, ask someone to show you 5+5 minute clips from out-of-town games you haven't seen (preferably with some good stuff in them so it's not totally boring), sometimes with a fight removed from between those two clips, sometimes just some other stuff. Try to guess whether there was a fight, and who won. Keep score. See how often people were right.
For the record btw, I'm not saying it's impossible that a fight sometime matters.
But why is it that people can't say "that fight mattered" without extrapolating it to "therefore all fights matter and fights are totally awesome"?
(If I'm really bored I'll also sometimes go through the GT's and PGT's and see how often even a single person has claimed a fight mattered. Seems pretty rare to me. I was actually surprised there were 20 fights.)
Over the course of a season, winning faceoffs doesn't matter. Faceoff winning percentage has almost no correlation with winning games, even though to the eye it seems like being a good faceoff team would have a huge impact.
Likewise, the majority of fights are not going to have any impact on the game, either positive or negative.
But every now and then, there is an instance where a specific faceoff win or a specific fight can have a significant impact on the outcome of the game. The problem is that this can only be determined after the fact. There is no way going into a fight or faceoff to know if it will be vital or simply another meaningless occurrence, and there is nothing inherent in the event itself which will lead to it being vital or meaningless.
Over the course of a season, winning faceoffs doesn't matter. Faceoff winning percentage has almost no correlation with winning games, even though to the eye it seems like being a good faceoff team would have a huge impact.
Likewise, the majority of fights are not going to have any impact on the game, either positive or negative.
But every now and then, there is an instance where a specific faceoff win or a specific fight can have a significant impact on the outcome of the game. The problem is that this can only be determined after the fact. There is no way going into a fight or faceoff to know if it will be vital or simply another meaningless occurrence, and there is nothing inherent in the event itself which will lead to it being vital or meaningless.
A bad pro-fighting example actually. Faceoffs are more an example that as long as connections exist, they can usually be found even when there's a lot of noise and randomness involved.
A tangent on faceoffs:
Spoiler!
Statistics suggest a good faceoff team in the NHL will get on average about 2-3 more points over the season than a bad one, all other things being equal. If somebody says faceoffs are not important they probably have a poor grasp of both statistics and NHL standings. (One reason why I don't think much of the "advanced statistics" crowd is that this claim seems to be rather common in those circles.)
To elaborate: if we accept your (IMO quite common and very reasonable) assumption that faceoffs produce extra goals (and thus points) somewhat randomly, it opens up a possibility for quite a bit of variance in how many extra points faceoffs can produce over the season. For example 6 extra points for might happen every season for some team. Even though we can't pinpoint after the season who got extra points for faceoffs and how much, and even though we can't be 100% sure that the correlation is significant, that doesn't matter much. As long as statistics suggest that there's a reasonable chance that it's significant, it's worth caring about. Especially since eyeballing the game goes with the statistics here.
Essentially, stats say we probably should not ignore FO%.
If you ask me, the corsi crowd tends to snub FO% because it doesn't lend itself to snubbery. Nothing discovered so far goes against commonly accepted truths, you can't use it to explain success or failure after the fact, nor is it very good as a prediction tool.
Now, it's perfectly reasonable to suggest that some fights matter even if most don't, I accept this. However, if a notable amount of fights mattered, that should show up somehow, just like with faceoffs.
Which is why I'm of the opinion that without further evidence the only rational stance is that it's probably extremely rare that a fight matters. Something like "not even once a season on average per team".
This is why I'm extremely suspicious of claims of how fights give the team energy. That to me sounds like something that should matter relatively often and thus easily show up in statistics. Plus there's the problem that I also can't see it with my own eyes.
Heh, the more I think of it, the more this feels like an atheist stance. I can't see it and there's no evidence of it's existence, but somehow I'm still in the minority
(As a caveat:
As far as I've seen, most "advanced" stats are really basic stuff, beginners level. I'm open to the possibility that I'll be eventually proven wrong on this by better studies. I'm sceptical because as I said I can't see it. But it wouldn't be the first time I'm wrong.)
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This is why I'm extremely suspicious of claims of how fights give the team energy. That to me sounds like something that should matter relatively often and thus easily show up in statistics. Plus there's the problem that I also can't see it with my own eyes.
Heh, the more I think of it, the more this feels like an atheist stance. I can't see it and there's no evidence of it's existence, but somehow I'm still in the minority
(As a caveat:
As far as I've seen, most "advanced" stats are really basic stuff, beginners level. I'm open to the possibility that I'll be eventually proven wrong on this by better studies. I'm sceptical because as I said I can't see it. But it wouldn't be the first time I'm wrong.)
Why do you need studies or stats to prove anything? If a Calgary Flame or any other NHL player says the fight changed the tide of the game, then it changed the tide of the game. It's as black and white as that. I'm not sure what you're trying to argue. If a player who is actually on the ice and plays the game says it made a difference, then it just bloody does. I'll take Kris Russell's word over internet stats any day. There's nothing to debate really. Not everything needs to be charted or made into some statistic. Sometimes players see a fight, their teammate wins it, and something in their brains just clicks to give them that extra adrenaline push. Who cares about measuring it. It happens.
Last edited by Huntingwhale; 03-12-2015 at 10:21 PM.
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I had no idea.
