What do you think about the random factor in hockey?

[Golden_Jet]

It’s right there in the link you posted.

But this also needs an extra layer of context, found here:



- During the regular season, tripping is the most commonly called penalty. During the playoffs, it remains commonly called, though at a slightly lower rate.
- During the regular season, hooking is the 2nd most commonly called penalty. It is called far less often during the playoffs, becoming one of the least called penalties.
- During the regular season, roughing is the 3rd most commonly called penalty. It is called far more often during the playoffs, rising to the same rate as tripping
- Cross-checking and slashing are also called far more often in the playoffs, but still remain af normative levels compared to penalties like interference and holding.
- Taking the roughing-slashing-crosschecking trio as a whole, it’s statistically obvious that the violence level goes way up in the playoffs — yet the overall number of penalties remains normative. Specifically, the extremely high prevalence of roughing calls offsets a decline in calls for other penalties, and it’s common knowledge that roughing calls are by far and away more likely to be offsetting penalties than any other.

To complicate matters further, the NHL has a well documented habit of decreasing the number of power plays awarded when it matters.

Power plays increase in the NHL playoffs, yes, but here’s why that feels deceptive

A look at data in recent years reveals that not all games are called equally.

www.nytimes.com

Power plays are handed out liberally early in the series, especially during blowouts, when “game management” dictates that the referees establish disciplinary control.

But when the game is tight, when it’s headed to OT, when it’s late in the series and penalties actually matter? Good luck getting that hooking call in Game 7 OT when someone handcuffs your star player during a rush. Good luck getting a non-offsetting roughing call when someone randomly jabs your 1D in the face to start a scrum. Statistically, the officials’ behavior is well documented as “you’re going to have to force me to call a penalty, and even if you do, I’ll make sure to even it up”.

So if you’re an underdog team and survive the first 4 games, it is by far and away in your best interest to push the limits by physically mauling the opposing superstar, interfering at key moments, and starting scrums after every whistle. The likelihood that this throws your opponent off their game and shortens their bench is a lot higher than the likelihood that it costs you a game on the PK.

In the big picture, that introduces an element of “randomness” in playoff upsets which traces directly back to a change in the way penalties are awarded. Smart teams take advantage of that as is documented in any number of Cup champions getting “tougher” and “grittier” to “be a playoff style team” as the final step in building their roster.

I saw that, didn’t say they were off setting, but I’m sure some definitely are.

 

[Fledgemyhedge]

I maintain that, if a team wins a seven game series, they were better. Doesnt matter about anything else, you can't win by luck. If a team is truly "better", they wont get beaten 4 times out of 7.

Now, one game semis and finals in international hockey is a different conversation.

If you simulated a hockey series 20 times I bet you’d get close to 50/50 results (maybe 60-40,65-35).

If you simulate a basketball series 20 times,
90% of the time you’d get the same winner.

Now that’s not to say the better playing teams not winning or negating your point but in one simulation you get a goalie stand on his head and in another that same goalie shits the bed. That’s the nature of the sport

 

[tarheelhockey]

View attachment 976262

I remember my British relatives honestly hoping to rent a minivan and drive to Vancouver when they visited me here in Ottawa.

"Er, do you have a week budgeted in your travel schedule?"

Hell, I’ve heard Americans suggest the same thing. And they know how far apart the NA coasts are. Some people just don’t grasp the practical reality of crossing an entire continent, perhaps for the same reason people have a hard time with big numbers.

 

[NyQuil]

Hell, I’ve heard Americans suggest the same thing. And they know how far apart the NA coasts are. Some people just don’t grasp the practical reality of crossing an entire continent, perhaps for the same reason people have a hard time with big numbers.

I explained that their flight to London was close to the same amount of time as the flight to Vancouver.

 

[Golden_Jet]

View attachment 976262

I remember my British relatives honestly hoping to rent a minivan and drive to Vancouver when they visited me here in Ottawa.

"Er, do you have a week budgeted in your travel schedule?"

On vacation in the Caribbean once, had someone say they have a friend in Calgary, asked if maybe I knew them.?

Told him Calgary was actually slightly further flight than the Caribbean .

 

[FissionFire]

The reason the NBA and MLB are boring is that outcomes are basically predetermined. You can almost always know who will win ahead of time. Rare cases like the Pistons beating the stacked Lakers happen but it’s so rare.

NHL is more dynamic and that makes it more fun. Better teams lose fairly often. Each game has more impact and importance. Even fans of the worst playoff teams have hope.

 

[NyQuil]

On vacation in the Caribbean once, had someone say they have a friend in Calgary, asked if maybe I knew them.?

Told him Calgary was actually slightly further flight than the Caribbean .

I was once asked if I knew someone in Canada and I did in fact know them.

It backfired on me.

 

[Machinehead]

Streaks can happen for reasons other than "randomness," such as form.

Form is just variance.

 

[Tie Domi Esquire]

Luck is for losers, much like stats.

 

[Brookbank]

Have to be good and lucky to win the Cup. That's why it's the best and hardest trophy to win in pro sports.

Well nobody flukes or Cinderella's their way to a Presidents trophy. Yet we have Cinderella playoff teams almost every year

 

[ijuka]

Form is just variance.

They're completely different things.

Form is the trend curve while variance is the sine wave on top of that.

Streaks are too frequent and lengthy to be just variance.

 

[x Tame Impala]

Hockey is way more random than most people in this thread want to admit.

The notion that the playoffs are a large enough sample to eliminate it is contrary to reality. It's not that big of a sample.

The Rangers were +1 at 5v5 last year and they won 55 games. That's over a whole season. Their goaltending wasn't even that good. Between the 2020 and 2021 regular seasons, the Canadiens played 138 games and won 46 of them. They went to the Stanley Cup Final in between. Things happen for no reason.

That doesn't mean you can't enjoy chaos but the sport is way more chaotic than most of the others.

It isn't. The Rangers are just rarely if ever built to be a legitimate Cup contender. It's evident in their playoff history of repeated losing. Also, making a point with that Habs team is a little disingenuous. There were some COVID-based extenuating circumstances there that year that would have never materialized in a normal season.

Sample size has nothing to do with it. The Regular Season is merely a vehicle to make revenue for the league and to determine playoff seeding, when the real season begins. The playoffs are everything. The sample size critique is a lame one, think of it like taking a class in college. Some students will get all of their assignments done throughout the year and have a good grade but then bomb the weighted final exam that accounts for 25-50% of their overall grade. Is it fair that they're a bad test taker? Irrelevant. The Final is the penultimate measurement of how apt you are at what you've been working towards all semester/season long. It's put up or shut up time. If you want to get a good grade i.e. be a Stanley Cup Champion you have to perform when the stakes are highest. 4 rounds best of 7 is plenty of time to eliminate luck and weed out the teams that aren't good enough.

 

[x Tame Impala]

Well nobody flukes or Cinderella's their way to a Presidents trophy. Yet we have Cinderella playoff teams almost every year

Most if not all teams don't play to win the President's trophy and it's often the case that teams will take their feet off the gas at some point for stretches of the season for a variety of reasons.

If there were no playoffs and all 32 teams had the singular goal of winning the PT and they all played each other an equal amount of times, then you would have a point. As it stands however, no one cares about the PT, people care about the playoffs and Stanley Cup winners.

 

[Machinehead]

It isn't. The Rangers are just rarely if ever built to be a legitimate Cup contender. It's evident in their playoff history of repeated losing. Also, making a point with that Habs team is a little disingenuous. There were some COVID-based extenuating circumstances there that year that would have never materialized in a normal season.

Sample size has nothing to do with it. The Regular Season is merely a vehicle to make revenue for the league and to determine playoff seeding, when the real season begins. The playoffs are everything. The sample size critique is a lame one, think of it like taking a class in college. Some students will get all of their assignments done throughout the year and have a good grade but then bomb the weighted final exam that accounts for 25-50% of their overall grade. Is it fair that they're a bad test taker? Irrelevant. The Final is the penultimate measurement of how apt you are at what you've been working towards all semester/season long. It's put up or shut up time. If you want to get a good grade i.e. be a Stanley Cup Champion you have to perform when the stakes are highest. 4 rounds best of 7 is plenty of time to eliminate luck and weed out the teams that aren't good enough.

The point wasn't that the Rangers ultimately didn't win the Cup. The point was that the Rangers won 55 games during the regular season, while actively being bad during the regular season! Hence, their mediocre goal differential during the regular season. I didn't say anything about the playoffs in that example.

"The smaller sample size is more important therefore it's more relevant" is an extreme cop-out that wouldn't be accepted anywhere but in sports. So is "the winner is a just winner because they won." That's literally begging the question.

Again, nobody is telling you not to enjoy it, especially if your team wins, but there's a huge level of subjectivity as far as who the best team is. This isn't professional wrestling where we get to decide that the right people win for the right reasons. It's a sport -- it's not justice, it's just a set of results.

The test example is absolutely horrible. It's not a good sample. That's why when I was a college professor, I never weighed a test that high in my entire career. You know what would get you a bad grade? If somebody submitted a project in my Data Analytics course and said "I drew all of my conclusions from a single data point because I arbitrarily decided that this single data point was objective, repeatable, and sacrosanct."

 

[Suntouchable13]

The point wasn't that the Rangers ultimately didn't win the Cup. The point was that the Rangers won 55 games during the regular season, while actively being bad during the regular season! Hence, their mediocre goal differential during the regular season. I didn't say anything about the playoffs in that example.

"The smaller sample size is more important therefore it's more relevant" is an extreme cop-out that wouldn't be accepted anywhere but in sports. So is "the winner is a just winner because they won." That's literally begging the question.

Again, nobody is telling you not to enjoy it, especially if your team wins, but there's a huge level of subjectivity as far as who the best team is. This isn't professional wrestling where we get to decide that the right people win for the right reasons. It's a sport -- it's not justice, it's just a set of results.

The test example is absolutely horrible. It's not a good sample. That's why when I was a college professor, I never weighed a test that high in my entire career. You know what would get you a bad grade? If somebody submitted a project in my Data Analytics course and said "I drew all of my conclusions from a single data point because I arbitrarily decided that this single data point was objective, repeatable, and sacrosanct."

Does anybody care who the best team is if they didn’t win? Sure, go have a parade for the Rangers last year if you think they were the best team. It only matters what players do when it matters most. I couldn’t care less about Matthews scoring 69 goals last year or Marner scoring 100 points, they did not do much when it mattered most.

 

[Machinehead]

Does anybody care who the best team is if they didn’t win? Sure, go have a parade for the Rangers last year if you think they were the best team. It only matters what players do when it matters most. I couldn’t care less about Matthews scoring 69 goals last year or Marner scoring 100 points, they did not do much when it mattered most.

I said it in my post. It's not about "caring." If you derive enjoyment from it, that's all that really matters. It's a game.

It's just that, every time this question is posed, people can't even accept that randomness is a huge factor. They have to die on the hill that the sport is a complete meritocracy. It's not. It wasn't designed to be. It is, after all, a game.

 

[Lshap]

The point wasn't that the Rangers ultimately didn't win the Cup. The point was that the Rangers won 55 games during the regular season, while actively being bad during the regular season! Hence, their mediocre goal differential during the regular season. I didn't say anything about the playoffs in that example.

"The smaller sample size is more important therefore it's more relevant" is an extreme cop-out that wouldn't be accepted anywhere but in sports. So is "the winner is a just winner because they won." That's literally begging the question.

Again, nobody is telling you not to enjoy it, especially if your team wins, but there's a huge level of subjectivity as far as who the best team is. This isn't professional wrestling where we get to decide that the right people win for the right reasons. It's a sport -- it's not justice, it's just a set of results.

The test example is absolutely horrible. It's not a good sample. That's why when I was a college professor, I never weighed a test that high in my entire career. You know what would get you a bad grade? If somebody submitted a project in my Data Analytics course and said "I drew all of my conclusions from a single data point because I arbitrarily decided that this single data point was objective, repeatable, and sacrosanct."

A best-of-seven playoff series may be a smaller sample than an 82-game season, but it's a large enough sample size to give full credit to the team, rather than crediting luck, randomness, or any supernatural force. Get to the SCF and you've played 20-24 games – that's an airtight case that the team earned it.

You mentioned subjectivity. True, human performance is always subjective and variable. But so what? We can't quantitatively prove The Beatles were the best band, but a lack of quantitative proof is not an argument they didn't earn that title. Same with sports. Same with a playoff series. Acknowledge the subjectivity, but don't use it to diminish the results.

Looking at hockey, in any individual game there are... just guessin' here... about 200-250 shots, passes, and bounces. A lucky bounce here, an unlucky deflection there, can tilt the result of a single game. A series of 4 to 7 games is about 1200-1600 of those mini events, which eliminates most of the randomness. Sure, human subjectivity plays a part, but again... so what? We're not talking about a desperate last-second shot where the basketball arcs across the court and whooshes through the net. A hockey playoff series is a long, intense head-to-head battle between the same two teams. That's solid evidence the winner was indeed the better team; in fact, it's better evidence than looking at their regular season point totals, which were accumulated against different competition.

 

[Cursed Lemon]

To some degree, I actually welcome randomness in hockey. It's not fun in the sense of coherency or "fairness", but I've noticed it often creates interesting results. Every hockey fan knows about moments where a broken stick, a weird deflection, etc. suddenly causes a scoring chance, but what I think people tend to overlook is how randomness actually breaks the systems of defensive strangulation that govern how hockey is played. Look at this clip of "the save" for Washington:



In no universe should Tuch end up with the puck here, and yet what happens? Eakin knows exactly where he is and puts it right on the tape without a second thought.

There are tons of examples of broken plays in hockey resulting in exquisite tic-tac-toe passing plays or disgusting displays of individual skill. It's like the players have all this ability and finesse that's being bottled up by how comparatively easy it is to defend in hockey versus producing offense. Random events often provide just the necessary half-second of breathing room for players to showcase their mental and physical aptitude in ways just like above.

It makes one wonder how we can cultivate that kind of hockey without needing a bizarre bounce off the stanchion.

 

[Machinehead]

A best-of-seven playoff series may be a smaller sample than an 82-game season, but it's a large enough sample size to give full credit to the team, rather than crediting luck, randomness, or any supernatural force. Get to the SCF and you've played 20-24 games – that's an airtight case that the team earned it.

You mentioned subjectivity. True, human performance is always subjective and variable. But so what? We can't quantitatively prove The Beatles were the best band, but a lack of quantitative proof is not an argument they didn't earn that title. Same with sports. Same with a playoff series. Acknowledge the subjectivity, but don't use it to diminish the results.

Looking at hockey, in any individual game there are... just guessin' here... about 200-250 shots, passes, and bounces. A lucky bounce here, an unlucky deflection there, can tilt the result of a single game. A series of 4 to 7 games is about 1200-1600 of those mini events, which eliminates most of the randomness. Sure, human subjectivity plays a part, but again... so what? We're not talking about a desperate last-second shot where the basketball arcs across the court and whooshes through the net. A hockey playoff series is a long, intense head-to-head battle between the same two teams. That's solid evidence the winner was indeed the better team; in fact, it's better evidence than looking at their regular season point totals, which were accumulated against different competition.

I feel like you're arguing two different things here.

When you say "so what? You can't diminish the results," I agree. At the end of the day. the only people who feel good are the people who won. If you win, you win. It's not about diminishing results. And you say you acknowledge the subjectivity, just that you're going to look past it.

But then you immediately contradict that point when you say 7 games eliminates the randomness. What happened to acknowledging it? That's the part I disagree with the most. That 7 games is a good sample. 7 games is NOTHING. It's a popcorn kernel in a storm drain. I don't even know if it's fair to say I "disagree" with that. Objectively, that's not a good sample. 24 games isn't a good sample either. Remember first ballot Hall of Fame goaltender Andrew Hammond?

And again, sure, it doesn't matter. This isn't biology. We're not trying to search for a truth here. It's a game. But you can't tell people the sport isn't random or that 7 games is a strong sample. That's not difference of opinion, that's just incorrect.

 

[Lshap]

I feel like you're arguing two different things here.

When you say "so what? You can't diminish the results," I agree. At the end of the day. the only people who feel good are the people who won. If you win, you win. It's not about diminishing results. And you say you acknowledge the subjectivity, just that you're going to look past it.

But then you immediately contradict that point when you say 7 games eliminates the randomness. What happened to acknowledging it? That's the part I disagree with the most. That 7 games is a good sample. 7 games is NOTHING. It's a popcorn kernel in a storm drain. I don't even know if it's fair to say I "disagree" with that. Objectively, that's not a good sample. 24 games isn't a good sample either. Remember first ballot Hall of Fame goaltender Andrew Hammond?

And again, sure, it doesn't matter. This isn't biology. We're not trying to search for a truth here. It's a game. But you can't tell people the sport isn't random or that 7 games is a strong sample. That's not difference of opinion, that's just incorrect.

The question is whether the winner of a playoff series is the 'best team'. I say yes, they are. Of course I acknowledge human variability plays a part, but at some point we have to stop using variability/randomness to invalidate or diminish actual results. It's an interesting debate, but it becomes a distraction when discussing any kind of human 'best'. A playoff series reaches the standard where the winner can be called 'the best', with as much accuracy as the variability of the universe allows.

There's no contradiction in what I said, just an attempt to balance the objective with the subjective. We just disagree on the portion sizes – I say 24 games is plenty to determine the best team; you see it as a popcorn kernel (good metaphor, by the way). I'm not denying randomness; I just don't give it as much weight as you do.

 

[Machinehead]

The question is whether the winner of a playoff series is the 'best team'. I say yes, they are. Of course I acknowledge human variability plays a part, but at some point we have to stop using variability/randomness to invalidate or diminish actual results. It's an interesting debate, but it becomes a distraction when discussing any kind of human 'best'. A playoff series reaches the standard where the winner can be called 'the best', with as much accuracy as the variability of the universe allows.

There's no contradiction in what I said, just an attempt to balance the objective with the subjective. We just disagree on the portion sizes – I say 24 games is plenty to determine the best team; you see it as a popcorn kernel (good metaphor, by the way). I'm not denying randomness; I just don't give it as much weight as you do.

I stole that metaphor from Jim Cornette.