What do you think about the random factor in hockey?

[dgibb10]

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.

And if they win in the future all of this will retroactively be changed (See Washington Capitals)

When you retroactively decide teams who didn't win "weren't legit" and any team who does win "is legit" of course you will end up with only "legit" winners.


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

This doesn't hold because those are 2 different skills. Assignments and test taking.

Maybe this argument would hold if the NHL played field hockey all regular season and then switched over to ice for the playoffs.

"4 rounds best of 7 is plenty of time to eliminate luck and weed out the teams that aren't good enough."

Yes, 4 rounds WILL weed out the teams that aren't good enough (as will the regular season before that). What it won't do is determine the single best team.

 

[bossram]

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.

I flipped a coin 7 times and got heads 6 times. I can now rightly conclude the chances of landing heads on a fair coin are 86%. I am very smart.

 

[NyQuil]

The teams themselves place the higher emphasis on the 'smaller sample size'--which alone taints the sample pool of the regular season, no?

If you eliminated the playoffs and people approached the regular season differently--rather than banking cap space, resting injured players/managing LTIR, making trades towards the best use of the smaller sample size--maybe the regular season would be more representative of the 'best team over 6 months' or whatever but in its current form teams are building towards peaking at the right time being the best team at the end of the season rather than the beginning.

If the goal was to 'win the season' rather than 'win the tournament' i'd buy the 82 game argument more.

I was about to post something along the lines of this and you already did it so well.

Kudos.

You don't win anything in the regular season. All you can do is put yourself in a better position to win in the post-season. The players know that.

I'm of the opinion (unsubstantiated) that veteran players pace themselves more as they are more familiar with the grind of the season and are not fighting for spots in the line-up on a day to day basis.

I'm curious as to whether older teams that are comprised of more veterans have more of a jump between their level of regular season play and playoff play.

How often do rookie stars excel in their first playoff experiences? Shouldn't their performance translate seamlessly if it's simply a continuation of the regular season?

 

[dgibb10]

I flipped a coin 7 times and got heads 6 times. I can now rightly conclude the chances of landing heads on a fair coin are 86%. I am very smart.

I think the problem in people's minds is this.

They are thinking it as "you can't win 4 straight series if you suck". Which is true.

If you're a 35% team in each game, you have a 20% chance to win each round, or a 0.16% chance of winning 4 rounds.

But, what it doesn't do is ensure the best team wins. (and this what they are missing)

If you're a ridiculous 75% team in each game (this would be basically the best regular season ever), you have a 93% chance to win each series. is just a 75% chance of winning it all.

And that isn't even factoring in that you play better than average team's in the playoff's. Eg you're mostly playing against 60% win teams already.

If you account for that by dropping it to 70%, your odds of making it through 4 rounds become 58%, around a coin flip.



Because they view it retroactively after the cup is won as the team winning the cup having won a single, first to 16 type series, rather than a set of individual ones

 

[Raccoon Jesus]

I was about to post something along the lines of this and you already did it so well.

Kudos.

You don't win anything in the regular season. All you can do is put yourself in a better position to win in the post-season. The players know that.

I'm of the opinion (unsubstantiated) that veteran players pace themselves more as they are more familiar with the grind of the season and are not fighting for spots in the line-up on a day to day basis.

I'm curious as to whether older teams that are comprised of more veterans have more of a jump between their level of regular season play and playoff play.

How often do rookie stars excel in their first playoff experiences? Shouldn't their performance translate seamlessly if it's simply a continuation of the regular season?

And I think it's further complicated by teams playing towards or away from that, bigtime. IE playing a tanking team in April is far different than playing a fine-tuned stanley cup champ 7 games in a row in June. I have a hard time buying my team is 'better' because they can beat the snot out of basement teams in a one-off in December in a weaker division than if they win 4 of 7 against the best of the best. The 'odds' argument oversimplifies this. There's a lot of noise that's being attributed to simple luck.

 

[Chockey22]

There seems to be two issues at play here - the first is whether 16-24 games is a big enough sample size to eliminate randomness; statistically it is not, but practically speaking it is 'good enough' to bring the probability of a series being decided by random chance alone low enough that the outcome feels genuinely earned.
The second is simply semantics - particularly the need to declare a team "the best". I prefer referring to teams as the Stanley Cup champs, because that's what they are. Are they always the best team (as measured by something other than wins) - often they are not. But if you decide by definition that the best team is the team that won, fine; but that really doesn't mean anything.

 

[dgibb10]

There seems to be two issues at play here - the first is whether 16-24 games is a big enough sample size to eliminate randomness; statistically it is not, but practically speaking it is 'good enough' to bring the probability of a series being decided by random chance alone low enough that the outcome feels genuinely earned.
The second is simply semantics - particularly the need to declare a team "the best". I prefer referring to teams as the Stanley Cup champs, because that's what they are. Are they always the best team (as measured by something other than wins) - often they are not. But if you decide by definition that the best team is the team that won, fine; but that really doesn't mean anything.

The sample size is 4 sets of best of 7. Not a single 20+ game sample.

There is a significant difference.

Assuming odds of 55% in each game, the odds of winning 4 straight 7 game series is 13.7%.

Assuming odds of 55% in each game, the odds of getting to 16 wins (cup) before reaching your 13th loss (max losses before you lose a series) is 48.75%

At 75% its 74.4% and 98.9% respectively
At 70% its 58.35% and 95.1% respectively
At 65% its 40.96% and 85.7% respectively
At 60% its 25.4% and 69.5% respectively
At 50% its and 6.25%, and 28.65% respectively
At 45% its 2.36% and 13.5% respectively
At 40% its 0.7% and 5% respectively
At 35% its 0.16% and 1.4% respectively
At 30% its 0.025% and 0.25% respectively

4 best of 7 series ensures no shit teams win.

It does NOT ensure the best team wins

 

[Grifter3511]

Could you even call it a sport if there wasn't a random factor? If the better, faster, stronger, etc won every single time and things went according to plan, wouldn't that just be science?

 

[Lshap]

If the playoffs was a 2 team best of 31 series sure that logic would make sense.


It's not tho. It is 4 7 game series'. And 7 games is not nearly enough of a sample size to limit luck as a factor.

You need to be a GOOD team to win 4 straight playoff series, yes, you cannot be awful and win 4 straight series.
But it doesn't make you the best team, because you can absolutely luck yourself into LOSING a single series



(sudden death winner take all OT adds MORE randomness, not less).

Your definition of "Best team" doesn't match any realistic standards.

Is it the team with the most regular-season points? No. If it was, the President Trophy winner would win the Cup almost every year. They almost never do. Since winning the Cup is the goal, the President Trophy winner is obviously NOT the best team, since they fail to reach that goal.

That leaves the playoffs. As I mentioned, of course there's some randomness in a series. But not nearly enough randomness to call the winner 'lucky'. Unless four wins happen by pucks bouncing off stanchions and being deflected off the ref's head, calling the winner lucky is inaccurate and, frankly, disrespectful to that team's focus, skill, and energy. Both teams square off with equal rules for both, with everything at stake, and with up to seven games to prove it. The winner has every right to be considered the best team.

Why do worse regular season teams regularly beat better regular season teams? Because playoff hockey is a different style of game that isn't reflected in the standings. Yes, there's also the variability of human performance – injuries, state of mind, reactions to higher-pressure games. You can call those factors 'random', I guess. I prefer to call them invisible. More important, they're generated entirely from within the players themselves, which makes the end result entirely earned.

Saying a team was 'lucky' sounds like they were helped along by external forces. That's simply not true, not for an entire series.

 

[Chockey22]

The sample size is 4 sets of best of 7. Not a single 20+ game sample.

There is a significant difference.

Assuming odds of 55% in each game, the odds of winning 4 straight 7 game series is 13.7%.

Assuming odds of 55% in each game, the odds of getting to 16 wins (cup) before reaching your 13th loss (max losses before you lose a series) is 48.75%

At 75% its 74.4% and 98.9% respectively
At 70% its 58.35% and 95.1% respectively
At 65% its 40.96% and 85.7% respectively
At 60% its 25.4% and 69.5% respectively
At 50% its and 6.25%, and 28.65% respectively
At 45% its 2.36% and 13.5% respectively
At 40% its 0.7% and 5% respectively
At 35% its 0.16% and 1.4% respectively
At 30% its 0.025% and 0.25% respectively

4 best of 7 series ensures no shit teams win.

It does NOT ensure the best team wins

I think we're in agreement here; albeit phrased differently - neither a 20 game stretch nor a 4 best of 7 eliminates randomness, but both do so to differing degrees such that the outcome is generally accepted as legitimate.
It's interesting that in 4 best of 7 games series, the probability of a stronger or dominant team winning is lower than in a straight 20 game sample, which one might interpret as implying it increases the influence of randomness into the outcome, but it also actually reduces the likelihood of random chance allowing a terrible team to overcome it's skill deficit.

 

[Fledgemyhedge]

Your definition of "Best team" doesn't match any realistic standards.

Is it the team with the most regular-season points? No. If it was, the President Trophy winner would win the Cup almost every year. They almost never do. Since winning the Cup is the goal, the President Trophy winner is obviously NOT the best team, since they fail to reach that goal.

That leaves the playoffs. As I mentioned, of course there's some randomness in a series. But not nearly enough randomness to call the winner 'lucky'. Unless four wins happen by pucks bouncing off stanchions and being deflected off the ref's head, calling the winner lucky is inaccurate and, frankly, disrespectful to that team's focus, skill, and energy. Both teams square off with equal rules for both, with everything at stake, and with up to seven games to prove it. The winner has every right to be considered the best team.

Why do worse regular season teams regularly beat better regular season teams? Because playoff hockey is a different style of game that isn't reflected in the standings. Yes, there's also the variability of human performance – injuries, state of mind, reactions to higher-pressure games. You can call those factors 'random', I guess. I prefer to call them invisible. More important, they're generated entirely from within the players themselves, which makes the end result entirely earned.

Saying a team was 'lucky' sounds like they were helped along by external forces. That's simply not true, not for an entire series.

I don’t believe the team that won the Stanley cup is necessarily the best team either. They’re just the team that won.