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.

 

[x Tame Impala]

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.

Which you'd think is a point in my favor, no? That the regular season is a conglomerate of uneven competition from a wide range of factors and it's imprudent to weigh regular season success as a better sample.

"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.

Well we ARE talking about sports. Despite the head-first dive into advanced analytics the last 15 or so years, hockey specifically is a very dynamic game and it's difficult to precisely explain or predict events in the game. It's no cop out, that's absurd. All sports are played with winners and losers in mind and we as fans as well as the league historically remembers and celebrates Stanley Cup winners. Of course the Championship is most relevant. If not that then what is the point of playing the game aside from making money? What's the point of watching? This may just be a bridge too far between us but if you don't see the Championship as the end all be all of the NHL then I'm not sure I can understand your perspective as it's simply too alien of an idea to me.

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.

You say that but then there's all this whinging, even in this thread, about the playoffs matter less due to luck or the yearly Stanley Cup winner is merely a yearly happenstance. When it's actually the opposite, the President's Trophy over your "better" 82 game sample size is much closer to irrelevant happenstance. It's an annoying ideology that IMHO is the antithesis of sports and competition. I think it's defeatist. I think it's one big excuse that a bunch of fans from loser franchises tell themselves if I'm being perfectly honest.

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."

Ridiculous again. So all assignments/projects/quizzes/tests were worth the same amount of points on your syllabi? Please.

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.

Every winner is a legit winner. 4 rounds, best of 7, weeds out teams not good enough to go the distance and beat all their opponents when the playoffs start. That's the whole point. The Capitals never won until they were the best team in the league. That may seem circular to you but at what point from 2009 until 2017 were they ever really the best team that year and really SHOULD have won the Cup.

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.

You're actually pretty dumb. A playoff series isn't a coin flip, what are you basing that on?

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?

From experience I know the Hawks core would routinely take their feet off the gas during the regular season and save themselves for the playoffs. After 2010 when that core spent the last two years going to the WCF, the Olympics, and another SCF i'm sure they realized they really only have to get into the playoffs and they'll be fine because they're such a talented team and have the experience to know how to "turn it on" when they need to. I'm sure it was the same for the Kings, Penguins, and Lightning.

 

[bossram]

What a hilarious tirade from @x Tame Impala

We get it man. Your brain can't conceive of anything beyond, "winners win and winners are the best, you're a loser until you win, at which point you are a winner".

Could've just said you believe in circular reasoning and called it a day.

 

[Raccoon Jesus]

Every winner is a legit winner. 4 rounds, best of 7, weeds out teams not good enough to go the distance and beat all their opponents when the playoffs start. That's the whole point. The Capitals never won until they were the best team in the league. That may seem circular to you but at what point from 2009 until 2017 were they ever really the best team that year and really SHOULD have won the Cup.

You're actually pretty dumb. A playoff series isn't a coin flip, what are you basing that on?

From experience I know the Hawks core would routinely take their feet off the gas during the regular season and save themselves for the playoffs. After 2010 when that core spent the last two years going to the WCF, the Olympics, and another SCF i'm sure they realized they really only have to get into the playoffs and they'll be fine because they're such a talented team and have the experience to know how to "turn it on" when they need to. I'm sure it was the same for the Kings, Penguins, and Lightning.

I think I'm extra sensitive to the argument about the regular season meaning so much because people were calling the Kings frauds as recently as the end of period 1 in 2014 vs. the Rangers...its only recently that people are coming around to them being a 'real' champion. Hell as recently as 2016 this argument was suggesting that despite the lack of a Cup the Sharks were the real best team of the entire era because of their regular season prowess.

Like I said above to some degree I'm open to the idea that the larger sample size is better...but is it, given the players and teams 'gear up' for the playoffs alone? I'd argue there's a lot more noise in the 82 game sample than that argument gives credit to, as you point out. For example, backup goalies, injuries, teams 'out of the race,' and much much more.

 

[bossram]

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?

Literally this. If people truly believed there was no randomness or no variance in sport, no one would watch anything at all. You could determine the winner with an algebra equation. There wouldn't even be sports at all.

The fact that people watch knowing, correctly, that "any team can win" on any given night, demonstrates there is an implicit admission variance is involved.

 

[RandV]

I agree with others that randomness is underrated. Scoring a goal can be so fluky. I've seen a lot of games decided by a point shot from the corner that bounced off a defenseman's foot. The chance of those shots going in might be 1% if it's not a 1 timer or from an elite goal scorer. But if that 1% goes in, it completely changes the complexion of the game.

If you believe that goal scoring has a random factor, and combine that with the fact that teams score about 3 goals a game, you can see that there is a great variance of how many goals you will score in a particular game.

Even in lacrosse, where teams can routinely score 10 or more goals, the randomness less important.

A sport like soccer feels less random to me because goal scoring feels more skill-based and less fluky. I'd love someone to confirm or deny my bias here. My intuition is that the ball is bigger and moves slower across the huge soccer field, which makes it take more predictable paths than a tiny rubber disk.

A lot of people are mentioning this, and yeah. Personally I'll watch a game see it as a close match but bounces went one way or the other, then look at my teams post game thread and so many comments that they played great/terrible depending on whether they won or lost. As I'm not that great at actually reading the game, though I think I'm pretty good at tracking momentum, never sure if it's me or them that has it wrong.

Replied here though to add one caveat about soccer, while yes it is a lot more skill and a lot less luck, the penalty kick is a completely different matter. Generally not so much for the top teams, but when I'm watching the World I feel like I see a lot where it's a 0-0 game then a ball happens to graze a defenders arm in the box on a nothing play, the other team scores on the penalty kick and that's the game.

 

[KirkAlbuquerque]

It’s not that random, really. The cup winner is usually the best team.

 

[NyQuil]

The Stanley Cup playoffs are essentially a knockout tournament that is seeded according to a previously played 82 game schedule.

You don't have to beat all the teams in the league to win the Cup, in fact, you only have to beat 4 teams to win it.

Match-ups can be another big variable.

You might be the better team against 95% of the entire league, but end up facing off against that one team that gives you trouble.

As it stands, the regular season has actually never been more important than it is now because there have never been more teams excluded from the playoffs.

The way the East is looking right now, there might be some decent teams left out of the post-season. I actually don't have a problem with that, even as a fan of a bubble team, because I think adding value to regular season performance makes for a more exciting February-March-April. I do suspect that the owners might eventually want to expand the number of teams and their own playoff revenue.

I understand why some sports (like soccer) put more of a premium on regular season standings because it takes some of the randomness out of it and evaluates teams based on their record against all of the other teams in the league (who they play an equal number of times).

However, it doesn't necessarily translate to the President's Trophy because as others have said, the players and staff are aware that it's not the ultimate prize and therefore may conduct themselves differently during the regular season. Not to mention, strengths of schedule are not identical.

I agree that calling a team the "Stanley Cup Champion" avoids a lot of the semantics around what "best" actually means.

However, given that all of the players and teams in the league have essentially agreed that winning the Cup is the goal of the season, it's the most convenient and fair way to evaluate who the best team is despite all of the obvious shortcomings.