I skipped watching Peyton Manning and a bunch of other people who aren’t important winning the Super Bowl so as to pull together some numbers I’m going to be posting over the course of the week. Today’s question: how bad is the Eastern Conference?
The answer? They’re fucking horrible looking. Just so you know, all numbers cited here from the era in which Bettman started screwing with the game treat OT losses as real losses and SO results as ties - the way God intended.
As of the All-Star Break, the East is at 34-51-12 against the West, a .412 winning percentage. They’ve scored 244 goals and allowed 292. That’s GF/GA ratio of 0.84. Terrible.
How terrible? Well it’s the worst performance by a conference since 1985-86, when the Campbell Conference went 118-187-25 for a .395 winning percentage. They got outscored that year since 1155 to 1422, a GA/GF ratio of .81. If those conferences were teams, we’d expect them to look something like this year’s Phoenix Coyotes in terms of their record.
I’ve got divisional records as well - there’ve been 104 “division seasons” since 1984-85. The East is so bad this year that only seven of the division seasons have been worse than the East’s performance this year. That’s really impressive - as the divisions are a lot smaller, it’s more likely that you’d find a truly craptacular one. Off topic, but this has to be noted - four of the worst ten seasons belong to the Southeast - you really should just go there for the weather.
What’s even more interesting is for how long the East has been bad - since 1999-2000, they’re 730-902-221. They’ve scored 4766 goals and allowed 5281. If you translate that into an 82 game schedule for a sense of scale, that’s like going 32-40-10, scoring 211 goals and allowing 234. The East has been last year’s Phoenix Coyotes in competition with the West, but for seven years.
I’m well aware of who has won the Stanley Cup the past three years so comments to that effect aren’t necessary (unless they refer to Calgary losing). The question I think you need to ask if you’re one who weights those things heavily is whether a couple of seven games series outweighs the results of hundreds of other games annually. I can’t imagine how it does.
I find the East’s accomplishment in being this bad this year more impressive than that of the Campbell Conference in 1985-86. The key difference is the availability of player movement. As that’s increased in sport, parity has increased along with it. Free movement of players makes it harder for great teams to develop as people decide to leave or their teams can no longer afford to keep them. You would expect it to be more difficult to sustain a long term edge and yet the West has done it for seven years and counting. I’m not sure why that is but I suspect that there’s something to be said for mediocrity breeding further mediocrity. Teams out West have greater pressure to excel because they need to achieve a higher level in order to accomplish anything. Out East, the bar is a lot lower and there’s less of an incentive for teams to ensure that they’re well run. If you trade Joe Thornton for magic beans, well someone else will gift you a hot prospect for a suspect goalie. No hole is too large to get out of because someone else will do something even dumber.
There was a pretty wide chasm between the National League and the American League, with the NL being the weaker league. If anything, the gap in the NHL appears larger and has been around for a longer period of time. I don’t really have any concrete theories as to why but I’m pretty sure it’s real.
Over the last 5 seasons the playoff seed in the west has been much lower (either because of luck or parity)
The average seed in the west is: 4.6
The average seed in the east is: 1.8
With that in mind, a 17 - 16 record for the west is quite impressive.
The west has only lost in 4 - 3 series..
In my opinion it’ll only get worse, because there’s no incentive for the east to get better.
Let’s also not forget that the West Champ generally has had a tougher road to the finals in past years. In a two month competition, that can be a major factor when the series is decided by a single goal as it has been in the last two.
So should we devalue the Oilers of 1985-1986 since they played in a much weaker Western Conference? Should “correct” Gretzky’s numbers because of all the craptacular western conference goalies he got to face that season?
When I was growing up the Norris Divsion teams were not much better than the Southeast Division that that you guys love to complain about (Perhaps we should have contracted them since they were bad eh?)
Who can forget that illustrious 1986-87 St. Louis Blues squad to “won” the Norris Division with a losing record and a negative goal differential. Even better how can I forget the four Norris teams that made the playoffs all had losing records that year (in case you forgot):
STL 32-33-15
DET 34-36-10
CHI 29-37-14
TOR 32-42-6
Or how about the following season when the Toronto Maple Leafs were allowed to participate in the playoffs despite this record 21-49-10!
My point? I find the disparities between the leagues interesting on an intellectual level. At the moment the East is weaker than the west and the East champion will likely have an easier time. If the Buffalo Sabres win the Stanley Cup this spring becaue of that easier road they will still be a great hockey team. Just as the Oilers were a terrific hockey team–I don’t take anything away from them just because they played in the weaker conference.
I find your subtext that Stanley Cup winners from weak conferences to be objectionable. Yes, some champions benefit from an easier regular season schedule. Some teams luck out and their opponents top goalie gets hurt. Some teams are fortunate because they management is superior or their ownership was willing to spend more money. Every team winning team usually recieves their share of good luck–that does nothing to dimish the accomplishment of winning sixteen hockey games in the battle for the Cup.
A very late entry into this conversation. Interesting stuff, although Gary Bettman’s screwing with game is not limited to the ridiculous system for rewarding teams that play for regulation ties (and where did you get your adjusted reuslts? I love ‘em!). The new schedule has reduced the “hundreds” of inter-conference games to a mere 150 a year now, and with entire divisions not playing each other at all, I would place much less stock in the small-number statistics that result.
As to whether the Oilers and Gretzky’s records in 1985-86 should be devalued, yes and no. At that time the schedule had eight games within your own division and three against everybody else. So the Oil got extra chances to beat up on Winnipeg, Vancouver, and Los Angeles, but played the terrible Norris Division (49 games below .500 when that figure actually meant something, a GF/GA differential of -189 with an execrable 4.37 GAA) precisely the same number of times that Eastern Conference teams did.
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