The Official NHL Playoffs Thread

[Equal]

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Going to see the cup tonight. Will take pictures. Let me know if you want to see them.

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I want to see. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

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The West has serious balance of power issues - the East lacks some of the awful, awful teams that the West does, so it makes the West seem better than it is.

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Are you fkking kidding? The top teams in the West are MILES above the best in the East, and overall. Look at the East vs. West regular season results over the last couple years.

[bluef0x]

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Home ice plays a much more important role in the NHL than other sports.

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I completely disagree.

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Maybe I'm just unaware of how NBA teams can alter their courts.

[MacGuyV]

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Home ice plays a much more important role in the NHL than other sports.

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I completely disagree.

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Maybe I'm just unaware of how NBA teams can alter their courts.

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You don't think the history of both games gives you enough of a sample to say results > theory?

[Hopey]

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Home ice plays a much more important role in the NHL than other sports.

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I completely disagree.

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Are you seriously arguing that a team being able to make the last change for the duration of a game will not significantly improve its chances at winning?

[Triumph36]

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Home ice plays a much more important role in the NHL than other sports.

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I completely disagree.

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Are you seriously arguing that a team being able to make the last change for the duration of a game will not significantly improve its chances at winning?

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yes.

someone had the numbers for home field/court/ice advantage - hockey is certainly not #1 among the 4 major sports, and I believe ranked 3rd.

[bluef0x]

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Home ice plays a much more important role in the NHL than other sports.

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I completely disagree.

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Are you seriously arguing that a team being able to make the last change for the duration of a game will not significantly improve its chances at winning?

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yes.

someone had the numbers for home field/court/ice advantage - hockey is certainly not #1 among the 4 major sports, and I believe ranked 3rd.

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Did you not see what I posted? The numbers fluctuate EVERY year. I looked at baseball and basketball, both of the graphs looked like a complete joke. The graphs end up looking like this (baseball):

[Triumph36]

no, i think i still had you on ignore then.

then cut it off at 1980 - why are we even concerned about 1920? cut it off when the modern schedule was introduced - or when plane flight instead of train rides became standard.

at 1980 the graph begins to normalize.

[bluef0x]

Because the "history of both games gives you enough of a sample"

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Also, earlier I posted that the correlation between home court and winning isn't very strong at all in the case of basketball over the past couple of years. I really don't feel like looking for more stats.... all of them appear to be the same. I'm guessing you've seen the 'playoff home-ice isn't that great' statistics also. If 3 of the major sports are random, I rather give the the edge to the sport that actually has benefits to the home team.

[Cry Me A River]

How is this calculated? Is this just straight up won or loss vs home or away?

If so it should be really obvious that the methodology is completely flawed. In particular, unbalanced schedules are going to put things way out of whack (ie: suppose the Red Wings played a bunch of last place teams on the road this year, and won all those games. It looks like he home team gained no advantage. But the reality is that the Wings are so much better than the Flyers or Coyotes that home field advantange is not nearly big enough to make any difference.)

You need to compare teams of even strength.

Or, you'd need to rank teams according to something like the Elo rating system and then compare expected outcomes to actual outcomes and see if the actual outcomes diverge according to home or away status.

And you'd have to watch for and eliminate other sources of noise. In particular teams who play back-to-back games in the NHL are at a huge disadvantage in the second game if the other team is fresh.

There are so many other variables that go in to determining who wins and who loses that it's going to be difficult to isolate homefield advantage. Injuries, streaks, player moves, travel schedules (traveling early vs traveling the night before). It might not even be possible to assign a value to home field advatage.