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East vs. West
by Paul on 12/04/09 at 12:14 PM ET
Comments (4)
from Kevin Allen of Mucking and Grinding,
Was thinking last night that no law degree was required to make a reasonably sound argument that the Eastern Conference is stronger than the Western Conference:
1. The East has the NHL’s top three offensive superstars in Alex Ovechkin, Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin.
2. The East has the reigning Norris Trophy winner in Zdeno Chara, plus another finalist in Mike Green.
3. The top of goaltending pyrimid in the East seems slightly better than the goaltending in the West….
Was feeling pretty good about the Eastern Conference-is-stonger theory until it occurred to me that the three most talented defensive units in the game are located in the West in the cities of Detroit, Calgary and Chicago. Plus, when I looked this morning 11 of the top 15 NHL scorers are from the West.
Filed in: NHL Teams | KK Hockey | Permalink
Comments
What an idiotic argument by Allen.
The West is 61-35-13 against the East. The West has gotten of 135 of 218 possible points, so 62%. That’s a Conference-wide winning percentage which would put a team in no worse that FIFTH PLACE in either conferences playoff pciture right now.
The West, again, is substantially better than the East, just like it has been in every post-lockout year.
Posted by HockeyinHD on 12/04/09 at 01:27 PM ET
There’s greater disparity between good and bad in the East while the West has a lot of mediocrity rather than bottom dwellers, which results in a better western winning percentage. Furthermore, the East has a more entertaining and perhaps naive offensive approach to the game. But in a seven games series, I can think of no western team that has an advantage over most eastern teams.
Posted by Moq from Denmark on 12/04/09 at 02:10 PM ET
Oh good grief.
When one conference is crushing the other conference head to head, and crushes the other conference for going on a fifth straight year, that’s called scoreboard.
The top 3 teams in the West points wise are 15-2-2 against the East.
The top 3 teams in the East points wise are 9-7-2 against the West.
So, If Chicago faced off with any of the top 6 East teams… they wouldn’t have an advantage over any of them? San Jose? Calgary?
Silly.
Posted by HockeyinHD on 12/04/09 at 04:35 PM ET
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I would think that the western teams are a lot better then the eastern teams. West teams tend to beat eastern teams when they play against them about 80 percent of the time. For example, this year, only 4 teams have losing records against eastern teams: Stlouis, phoenix, edmonton, anahiem. Whereas, many teams in west are 4-1, 6-1, 8-1, 5-0 etc aginst the east. This trend has continued for the last 5 or so years.
Add to this the west’s insane travel schedule, and it makes an even bigger case. Sure, some of the biggest stars are in the east, mainly, ovechkin, crosby, and malkin. But the western conference is no slouch either with Thornton, heatley, iginlia, kopitar, getzlaf to name a few. They just don’t get as much attention as those players in the east.
Posted by Luongo-is-my-hero on 12/04/09 at 12:28 PM ET