Elimination game specialists
Oldie but a goodie

Sports have been a part of society for as long as we’ve been keeping track. Ancient texts have the Olympic games starting as early as the year 175, with Greek mythology dating them far before then. Look at the Coliseum in Rome: a huge venue for fans to watch games being played — however questionable the morals of those games are.

Another fun thought: the word ‘fan’ is actually short for ‘fanatic,’ defined as a person with an obsessive interest in and enthusiasm for something, especially an activity. Obsessive enthusiasm makes for some pretty fun clients. So since sports are a (high revenue) business, and some very intelligent people exist to make money off of obsessive enthusiastic people, fantasy sports (among other things) came to life.

With fantasy sports comes armchair GMs. It seems anywhere you go, someone knows how to manage a team better than Glen Sather, or coach the Rangers better than Alain Vigneault. My personal favorite activity at the Garden is to appreciate all the coaches around me and feel extra blessed that I paid to hear all of their opinions.

Everyone has heard of fancy stats, which we’ve gone over ad nauseam here. Heck, there’s even a metrics tab to explain the basics. Most of the time, they’re a good indicator of play that the naked eye can’t see because, as humans, it’s difficult to stay objective all the time. Naturally our emotions will get involved in some of what we see, and aside from this, it’s easy to forget ten great plays if a player makes one bad play, or even a flukey play that leads to a goal.

Last summer, I wrote an article about the Oilers hiring a fancy stats-loving coach in Dallas Eakins, and I compared front offices looking at these stats in the same light that MLB GMs viewed moneyball. The similarities have a lot to do with formulas and equations and math, statistics that can be measured in a spreadsheet and should follow a trend. This has worked for the Oakland A’s for a long time, and possession-driven statistics have worked for certain teams (though not the Oilers, and Eakins was let go) in the NHL as well.

As we look at the Rangers, now facing potential elimination tomorrow night in Tampa, there have been tons of articles posted about their possession numbers, along with posts about how fearsome their defense is, even people stating that Henrik Lundqvist has unrealistic stats that lend the Rangers’ advanced stats to be altered favorably and inaccurately. There is a simple explanation to all of this: the media need to post continually in order to drive readership, and they seek topics about anything. Great writers can argue a position from beginning to end no matter how bananas it may be.

On the day before another Rangers elimination game, in a postseason where they have come back from a 3-1 deficit, the only stat we have to remember is this: the team that scores more goals in 60 minutes wins. It isn’t a measure of whose possession is better after offensive zone starts, or whose defensemen have a higher scored-adjusted corsi for. It’s also not about your personal vendetta against Marc Staal and as such, noticing only that he took a penalty and not that he blocked a shot that Henrik wasn’t set up to save. It’s about the team that scores more.

The Rangers better be that team tomorrow night, or there will be tons of questions for management and players alike to answer, and a long offseason looming.

Share: 

More About: