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Uneven Conferences
by PuckStopsHere on 02/10/09 at 01:25 AM ET
Comments (6)
It is important to keep in mind how much better the West Conference is than the East Conference. Tyler Dellow has a post that shows how this has been true over the last several years. He shows the winning percentage of the west in games against the east since 1999/2000 and shows that the West Conference has a significant winning record every year except 2003/04. This season, the west has a .559 record (treating games that are tied after 60 minutes as ties). That is the highest winning percentage for the west since 1999/2000. Western dominance is not going away. If anything it is getting bigger.
Given the level of player movement in the NHL, such a trend is surprising. With free agency, one would expect things to even out. If one conference was better at one time, it would quickly be evened out as free agents move throughout the league. This is not what has been observed. The west is better than the east and has been almost consistently for a decade.
I think the reason is travel. West teams have to travel significantly more than east ones do. That shows up in the standings. West teams that are as good as east teams will have worse records. This will force moves to be made to strengthen the western teams. The eastern team can be more complacent because they have a stronger record than they should have and will be less likely to improve. If you transplanted the New York Rangers or the Philadelphia Flyers to the west, they probably would not be good enough for playoffs, but in the east they should make them handily. Thus the western equivalent of such a team is pushed to improve while the eastern version can be complacent as they feel they are already “good enough”.
This difference between conferences is something that needs to be considered when looking at the standings. The Boston Bruins may have the best record in the league with 85 points, but how would they do in the west? I don’t think they are the best team in the NHL. I think they would be near the top, but below San Jose and Detroit in the standings.
On the other end of the standings, the five worst teams in the league are all eastern teams. The New York Islanders, Atlanta Thrashers, Ottawa Senators, Tampa Bay Lightning and Toronto Maple Leafs have the five worst records in hockey. Just how bad are those teams? They are even worse than their record suggests. In the west, they would have even worse records. It is a rather sobering thought when one considers just how far from Stanley Cup contention any of those teams are.
One person who attempts to take this into account is David Johnson with his power rankings. He considers the strength of schedule when ranking teams. Every east team has a schedule strength below .500 and every west team has one above. Boston may have the best record in the league, but they are third in his power rankings. Of the 16 top teams (nominally the playoff teams), 10 are western teams and six are eastern. If the season ended now, Buffalo and Carolina would make the playoffs. Johnson ranks them 22nd and 20th respectively. However, Edmonton and Columbus would miss the playoffs. Johnson ranks them at eighth and 14th. This would leave Edmonton and Columbus trying to improve and leave Buffalo and Carolina thinking they are “good enough”. Those feelings would be opposite reality. The better teams are the ones trying harder to improve. That feeds this situation where the West Conference is better than the East. The West teams think they are worse than they are and the East teams think they are better than they are and they react accordingly in off-season moves.
It is amazing how much better the West Conference has been than the East and how long that dominance has lasted. With the level of player movement in the league, a trend like that lasting for a decade is surprising. It is a fact that must be taken into account when handicapping NHL games. More than likely, a western team will win the Stanley Cup. More than likely, a player heading east to west in the off-season will see his numbers drop and player heading west to east will see them rise. It is a major inequity in the NHL and one that most people fail to recognize.
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Comments
Using the Stanley Cup as your only datapoint from each year loses a lot of the information. Tyler Dellow shows with his data the west has been better than the east almost constantly since 1999/2000. During that time there have been 8 Stanley Cups won (none during the lockout season and none yet this year). During that time there is a 4-4 west east Stanley Cup split. What would you expect to be the result? The average season in that period has a .541 winning percentage for the west. As a first approximation, lets assume that means the west should win .541 of the eight cups. How many is that? 4.3 cups in 8 years. Since you can’t win a franction of a cup, its quite likely we would find a 4-4 split (as we do).
The problem of your justification is that you threw away most of the data to keep only one point per year. Because you have so little data, the western superiority over the east is lost in the noise of your data.
Posted by PuckStopsHere on 02/10/09 at 02:59 AM ET
Travel plays great role in playoffs. PIT, PHI, NYR, NJ can start their games at 8 pm and visiting team can still be in their beds by midnight. BOS and CAR aren’t that far away. Their worst matchup is TB vs MON. It is quite likely that East winner is much less tired than West winner - the worst possible travel route in East is maybe average one in West (VAN, ANA, COL, DET, DAL, EDM, SJ...). Also, Western teams have reputation for tighter defense (except NJ) and more physical play (ANA, CAL, DAL, SJ). After three rounds Western team is much more likely to be banged up.
Posted by dr on 02/10/09 at 04:39 AM ET
More than travel, I think what propels the Western Conference past the East is that the elite teams in the West have been -so- elite that the rest of the conference has had to push hard to match them, knowing that if they didn’t it would be more than likely they’d get crushed in the second round and never even get a sniff of the Cup Finals.
In the East no team has ever been able to seperate itself from the pack and establish that kind of dominance, much less two… so GMs can go into any year knowing that if they have an at least competitive roster they have at worst a random chance to win the conference. In the West there’s a better than average chance a team has to knock off a major heavyweight just to win their division
Also, regarding just using the Cup Finals as a data point… going back to 1995-6 when the West essentially started it’s dominant run, the Western Conference has won 8 Cups to 4, and the games within the Finals 43-24. No Eastern Conference team has won a Cup since 1996 in fewer than 7 games, while 5 of the West’s 8 Cups came in 5 games or less.
The difference is pretty clear right across the board, IMO. It’s more a question of correctly determining when that dominance started.
Posted by HockeyinHD on 02/10/09 at 07:00 AM ET
It is surprising that the West is the better conference in spite of the significantly more difficult travel schedule for the entire season, not just playoffs.
Posted by Nathan from Jonny Ericsson's ice cream truck on 02/10/09 at 08:13 AM ET
I was just countering one statement in the final paragraph not the entire body of work which I think is correct. I should have been more clear. “More than likely, a western team will win the Stanley Cup.” That one statement stands out since the cup is the goal. I don’t argue that the West is stronger conference. Only that one should expect the cup to go to a western team. I’m not sure I have that expectation. As you point out in your response the expectation given the data only slightly favours the west and I would argue that the playoffs and the final are different enough beasts that the wests strength may disappear. Since the cup is often viewed as the be all to end all of Hockey. Your statement stand out. The statement draws your conclusion into question because some measure the NHL by the Stanley cup not the presidents trophy.
As I said it is not that I disagree with you. Just that the one single conclusion stands out because of of its importance.
I also like the counter-intuitive thought that the travel difficulties strengths the west.
Posted by Mogen_david on 02/10/09 at 10:44 AM ET
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Except the Stanley cup over the last 10 years is split evenly. In fact, since in twenty years the West/Campbell has only won 11 of 20 Still pretty even.
Having this discussion over beers, most folks have attributed the apparent difficulty to being beaten up in the playoffs.
Posted by Mogen_david on 02/10/09 at 02:24 AM ET