The Prince George Cougars hope to turn things around tonight in their first-round playoff series against the Victoria Royals. The problem is we already know who the best team is and it's not the Cougars.
The numbers don't lie.
Both teams played 72 regular-season games in the 2014-15 season. The Royals won 39 times, lost 29 times and lost four times in overtime. The Cougars only won 31 games, losing 36 other times in regulation and five more games in overtime.
While a best-of-seven series is exciting for the fans, it is a far less statistically robust method of measuring who is better than a 72-game season.
Even the school kids know that nothing destroys the good times vibe like mathematics but there's no point in arguing. The math geeks have taken over professional sports analysis in recent years and hockey is no different.
Baseball has a long tradition of statistical assessment, thanks to Bill James and a group called the Society for American Baseball Research behind sabermetrics. Even with that background, the numbers were mathematical curiosities until Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics started using them to help him choose players, as chronicled in the book and movie Moneyball.
Hockey is new to the numbers game, hence the buzz over Corsi and Fenwick, two of the latest numerical measurements for teams and individual players to gauge their on-ice effectiveness and productivity. Goals and assists are still valuable but measuring puck control, shots taken, shots blocked, offensive and defensive zone time, faceoff wins and losses, and so on can give both players and coaches some valuable insight on both their team and their opponents.
As sports economists (yes, there is such a thing) David Berri, Martin Schmidt and Stacey Brook explain in their influential 2007 book The Wages of Wins: Taking Measure of the Many Myths of Modern Sport, a long regular season tells fans who the best teams are and the playoffs are just for fun.
The biggest problem with applying statistics to sports is when it runs into the "conventional wisdom" of fans, which is not really wisdom at all but emotion, instinct and agreeing with what everyone else says. Conventional wisdom sees fans "cheering for laundry," as Jerry Seinfeld put it so well. In other words, they love their team and the players who wear the jersey but they really have no idea if they're any good.
Conventional wisdom saw four goalies go in the first round of the 2001 NHL entry draft, the year Dan Hamhuis went 12th overall. Not one of those four goalies is still in the league and two of them never made it at all.
Meanwhile, the seventh goaltender taken in that draft was Craig Anderson, who is the starting goalie for the Ottawa Senators this year. Why didn't Anderson go much higher?
With teams investing millions of dollars in player salaries, the incentive is high to find reliable measurements of current productivity and future potential. With so many variables, however, it's difficult to assess. The challenge is no different in the junior hockey ranks. The Royals should beat the Cougars in a seven-game series but the excitement of playoffs comes from its unpredictability. The sports economists call it "competitive balance." In other words, the Cougars are close enough to the Royals that there is still a decent chance they could win this playoff round.
In the hockey world, the Cougars are the underdogs and the Royals are the favourites, which means Victoria fans will judge their team harshly if their team falls to the Cougars, especially after taking a 2-0 lead. Mathematically, however, that's an unfair conclusion reached with minimal data (just seven games). On the flip side, if the Cougars come back to knock off the Royals in six or seven games, Prince George fans can't claim their team was really better because the regular season numbers show otherwise.
Cougars fans, let's have fun at the playoff games ahead and let's root for our team, regardless of whether they win or lose or whatever the statistics suggest is going to happen. The statisticians and conventional wisdom fans can all agree that the only numbers that really count in sports are the ones on the scoreboard when the final horn sounds.
