Some of you may know that I follow basketball fairly closely, and one of the B-ball sites I regularly visit is called 'The Wages of Wins' - where they do a statistical analysis of basketball that seeks to calculate a players worth to his team in the number of 'wins' said player contributes through his stats aside from just his raw scoring.
Earlier Doug had raised the question of whether or not the Flames should 'blow it up' based on the failure to advance out of the 1st round since their 2004 Stanley Cup finals appearance. I had argued that the core group of players was fine, and that blowing things up is what you do when the core is obviously inadequate.
Well on Wages of Wins today, there was this quote that put the Flames losses into perspective for me;
“…if one team is good enough to warrant beating another in 55% of its games, the weaker team will nevertheless win a 7-game series about 4 times out of 10. And if the superior team could beat its opponent, on average, 2 out of 3 times they meet, the inferior team will still win a 7-game series about once every 5 match-ups....So sports playoff series can be fun and exciting, but being crowned “world champion” is not a reliable indication that a team is actually the best one.” (p. 70-71). The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (bold emphasis mine: ch)
This is both intuitive and fascinating when you think about it. Despite the fact that a team like Detroit is a clearly superior team to most (if not all) in the NHL, 40% of the time they can expect to go home and self flagellate over the hows and whys they lost to an inferior team.
This is why playoff hockey is so exciting - it has random elements at play (a bounce here, an injury there, a hot goaltender, etc.) that make the outcome too chaotic to reliably predict.
And ultimately, that is why they play the games.
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