Once upon a time, being a .500 team was a reasonable barometer of average-ness. Roughly half the teams in the league would be above that mark and half would be below it. Teams that were above .500 were usually happy with that result, and teams below it were correspondingly less happy.
Today "being .500" is a useless stat. The problem lies in its method of calculation - a team's point total is divided by its' maximum possible points (games played x 2) and presto, there's the "winning percentage". Except that nowadays teams get points for losing too, and so your point total has nothing at all to do with winning anymore. If you use .500 as your barometer of success today, then 16 of 22 (73%) of the teams in the WHL are having pretty good seasons, and that's ridiculous.
So far there have been 497 points awarded this year for 456 games played. That works out to a .545 winning percentage for the "average" team. Using .545 as the measuring stick, there are 10 teams above that mark and 12 below it - a much more even distribution.
3 comments:
Maybe I am a traditionalist but to me in the regular season a tie is a tie. Both get a point and go home leaving overtime for the playoffs. I never understood the push to have a winner for all regular season games.
In response to Craig the move to overtimes and shoot outs is purely an attempt to make the game more exciting for fans. I think that has worked. O/T periods (4 on 4) and shoot outs have proved to be very exciting - case in point the Wash-NYI game last night. Far more interesting than going home with a tie. Even the loser feels rewarded for a hard fought game.
In respect to .545, I agree Alan, that is the new breakeven benchmark. Sports commentators should pick up on this and use the new baseline. Why don't you write an article for Sporting News? It's worth a column or two.
Hitmen 212
Interesting stats. Glad my team is above .545.
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