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Originally Posted by blogofmike
That is an interesting article, but I would like to see that analysis of more than overachievers. I also don't know why a "playoff team" must exceed Expected Wins EVERY year. It seems to expect them to be automatic instead of consistent, and punishes them should they improve in the regular season the following year even if their playoff performance is exactly the same.
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Because the term "playoff team" does not mean a team that just does well in the playoffs. The term "playoff team" is used to mean a team that is somehow better-suited to playoff hockey than regular-season hockey. If that's the case, they should consistently do better in the playoffs than they do in the regular season. If they do as well in the playoff as you'd expect them to do based on their regular season, they're just a good team, not a good playoff team.
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Originally Posted by blogofmike
The Edmonton Oilers were a great playoff team. They made the Finals in 6 of 8 seasons from 1983 to 1990. To the surprise of no one, they won't do well when N+1 years are 1986 and 1989. But they were in the Finals the other 6. They were persistently good.
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Again don't confuse "great team" with "great playoff team". Their regular season finishes from 1983 to 1988 were 2, 1, 2, 1, 1 and 3. And you just told me that a big reason that #1/#2 teams make the finals so much is that they get the easiest schedules in the playoffs? The Oilers were consistently one of the very best teams in the regular season. Why does their easy schedule not count against them?
Their only "surprise" final might be 1990, but even then they had finished 5th in the league, so they were hardly a shock to find in the final.
Why is it not a surprise they didn't do well in 1986? They finished with 119 points, equalling their best total ever, Gretzky had just once again broken his own scoring record with 215 points, and they had won two consecutive Stanley Cups. Why would they be expected to do badly in 1986?
You're egaging in exactly what I warned against: post hoc reasoning. You're saying that the results of my study aren't surprising only because you know that they did poorly in the playoffs in 1986. But going into the 1986 playoffs, no one had any reason to suspect that they would do poorly. They were prohibitive favourites to win a third consecutive Cup.
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Originally Posted by blogofmike
The general point was more that #1 seeds don't have to play #2 seeds very often. #1 seeds aren't tested as much and can win Cups with much more ease than if they had #1 face #2 in the first round.
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It doesn't matter when you lose to a team, if you lose to a team in the playoffs you cannot win the Cup. The chart I linked to isn't finals appearances, it's Cup championships.
It's funny you bring this up in the context of the Oilers. By my count the #1 team has met the #2 five times in the finals since 1980. Four of these occurred between 1984 and 1989 (it's a much more likely occurrence in times of lesser parity in the league), and three of these involved the Oilers. The #1 team has won 4 out of these 5 matchups. So the #2 teams haven't tested the #1 teams too badly.
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Originally Posted by blogofmike
So the regular season games had no impact on the actual Best-of-7 playoff series result?
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No, four games isn't enough to tell you anything. In order for your assertion to hold true, you have to demonstrate an actual difference between the regular season and the playoffs. Your comment is based on a premise that you have not proven.
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Originally Posted by blogofmike
Edmonton and Calgary would have similar regular season finishes, similar rosters, similar coaches and similar playing styles between both years. A best-of-seven series from a year prior has some value in this case given the similarities.
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Some value. But you're suggesting that a greatly-superior regular-season team should be considered an underdog because of what happened in four games the season before. You're vastly overrating the value of what those four games can tell you.
You've also gone from asking why teams should be expected to do as well in one playoff season to another, to asserting that teams should be expected to do the same from one playoff series to another.
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Originally Posted by blogofmike
Were those 6 rematches the same as in this case where they yielded a similar matchup in each of those categories the following year? Or did they just have the same laundry as the previous year?
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Of the nine teams involved, I count two coaching changes, and one of these is Montreal which I daresay played very much the same in 1988 and 1989, with very similar results. In terms of how any team moved up or down the league in offence or defence, the biggest change is actually Calgary's defence, which improved from 12th to 2nd, and we already know that Calgary was effectively the same team from 1988 to 1989.
Who played any different? The teams are Boston, Buffalo, Montreal, Hartford, Calgary, Edmonton, Washington, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Edmonton and LA are the teams with big changes at the top of their teams, and that's all due to the same movement. But the Calgary-LA series is one that had the same result in both seasons: the Flames won.
The only real possibility of change is the Flyers. They changed coaches, though it didn't really affect their results, and their lineup is very much the same as well. The big difference was that Tim Kerr wasn't injured in 1989, and perhaps that's what enabled them to beat the Capitals when they had lost to them the year before, though in 1988 it should have been a toss-up anyway since they both had 85 points.
