Rising and Falling in the Western Conference

12 years ago

The simplest way to win a hockey game is not to “forecheck harder” than the opposition. You don’t get two points for blocking more shots than the other team, and at the end of the day, no one cares if you played more physically or even directed more shots at the net. What matters is the scoreboard, and the simplest way to win a hockey game is to score more goals than the other team.

It’s such an easy concept, and yet, when analyzing the standings throughout the season and looking to see where there’s room for teams to move, the “put the puck in the net, prevent the same” formula is all too often thrown to the wayside.

Baseball writer-turned-executive Bill James, who I regard as the greatest sportswriter of all time, had a very interesting metric to help us determine how many wins a team should “expect” to have. It is called Pythagorean Expectation, and while i sounds like a lot of math, it really just involves plugging a couple of numbers into a spreadsheet and letting it do the work for you.

Pythagorean Expectation, according to Wikipedia, can be described as such:

In hockey, we can simply replace “runs” with “goals” and at the end of the season, a team’s goal differential syncs up very well with a team’s record, except in maybe three or four extreme cases. The theory behind this is that winning close games isn’t a true team talent as much as it is luck and random draw. If a team scores 270 goals and allows 200, regardless of the order, it will win 53 games.

Since winning close games is luck-based, we can use it to look at which teams may have enjoyed “good luck” in the first part of the season. What Pythagorean Expectation allows us to do this early in the season, is judge how many games a team should have won, not necessarily how much they have won. We should be able to see who is due for a climb.

First, the current Western Conference standings:

Team	GP	W	Pts	Pts/82
Detroit	22	14	29	108
Minnesota	24	14	31	106
San Jose	21	13	27	105
Phoenix	23	13	29	103
St. Louis	24	14	30	103
Chicago	25	14	31	102
Vancouver	24	14	29	99
Dallas	24	14	29	99
Los Angeles	24	12	28	96
Edmonton	24	12	26	89
Nashville	24	11	26	89
Calgary	23	10	21	75
Colorado	24	10	21	72
Anaheim	23	6	16	57
Columbus	24	6	15	51

The cutoff between first and eighth, based on simple point percentage, is 99 points. The Western Conference has apparently played well enough against the East so far that a team will need almost 100 points to crack the playoffs. If that number seems a little high, it’s because it is, and it is bound to drop to a more reasonable 94 or 95 points.

If the playoffs started today, the Canucks would apparently be the 7th seed, playing in Minnesota. I’d almost take that.

Why? Because take a look at each team’s expected win total over 82 games:

Team	GF	GA	xW	xPts
Detroit	65	49	52	115
San Jose	60	48	50	110
Vancouver	73	60	49	108
St. Louis	59	50	48	105
Phoenix	65	57	46	103
Edmonton	65	60	44	99
Minnesota	57	53	44	98
Los Angeles	57	55	42	95
Chicago	80	78	42	94
Dallas	62	65	39	88
Nashville	60	63	39	88
Calgary	51	60	34	79
Colorado	62	73	34	79
Columbus	55	79	27	64
Anaheim	50	76	25	60

(xW = expected wins | xPts = expected points)

Now, Vancouver appears to be on a 108-point pace, as they have outscored their opponents by 13. In essence, their early record is disproportionate to their play. Here, Minnesota, with a 4-goal differential, has simply 98 “expected” points. For expected points, I gave each team the benefit of ten overtime losses. There’s no real scientific basis for this, but it gives us a better ballpark figure for how good a team will have to be to make the playoffs.

Here, Minnesota is 7th, and the Canucks would play a series against Edmonton to start the playoffs.

According to early season goal differential, Columbus, Edmonton and Vancouver are much better than their records indicate, while Chicago, Minnesota and Dallas have earned the benefit of some close wins so far.

Rising and Falling in the Western Conference

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