The Puck Stops Here
Western Supremacy
by PuckStopsHere on 11/26/10 at 09:55 PM ET
Comments (1)
Once again this year, the West Conference is playing better hockey than the East Conference. This story has been repeated for the last several years. This year, West Conference teams have a record of 49 wins and 39 losses with 10 regulation tie points (as the NHL reports things this is a 49-29-10 record). This is a slightly better pace for the West Conference than was accomplished last year and last year was an improvement on the year before. The discrepancy between the West and East Conference is getting bigger.
I explain this as a reaction to the travel discrepancies in the NHL. Travel makes life harder for West Conference teams than for East Conference ones. West Conference teams log more miles over the course of a season and it catches up to them.
Over the course of the season East Conference teams will appear better than they are in the standings and West Conference teams will appear worse than they are. Travel favors the Eastern teams. It is worth approximately a difference of six points per year. This means that East Conference teams will finish with six more points than an equivalently talented West Conference team on average.
Systematically this gives East Conference teams later draft picks than West Conference teams get. So West Conference teams get to draft better players. As a result of East Conference teams over-performing their talent levels, their players will outproduce western players of equivalent talent statistically. It is easier to score in the East Conference. In fact, the top five scorers in the league right now all play in the East Conference. Steve Stamkos, Sidney Crosby, Alexander Ovechkin, Alexander Semin and Martin St Louis are the top five scorers in the league. Four of them play in the Southeast Division, which is the weakest division in the league. The weaker your opponents, the better your individual statistics will be and the bigger a contract you will be able to get when it is time for a new contract. In a salary capped era, we have a limit to how much money a team can pay their players and if they are systematically overpaying their players for statistical advantages that are due to weak opposition.
As a result of this, East Conference teams draft weaker players and overpay to keep them. This systematically makes West Conference teams better relative to East Conference teams. This system is systematically increasing the difference between the conferences. Also, it is influencing our ideas of who the best players in the game might be. Daniel Sedin and Brad Richards are the top scorers in the stronger conference with 26 points each. Does anyone consider seriously among the top players in the game, or are they at best in the next group? The top goal scorer in the West Conference is Patrick Sharp of the Chicago Blackhawks with 14 goals. Is he considered one of the better players in the league by anyone?
The moral of the story is that the West Conference is increasing its level of dominance over the East Conference year by year. We overrate East Conference players and underrate West Conference players. We probably make poor award choices by picking East Conference players with better numbers. One secret to winning a hockey pool might be to find players who are moving from the West Conference to the East Conference. These players will see their numbers climb with an equivalent performance and are thus likely underrated. Two obvious examples in this group are Andrew Ladd and Dustin Byfuglien who jumped from Chicago to Atlanta. This is one of the more under reported discrepancies in the NHL.
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Good point about the drafting perpetuating the discrepancy. Do you have a guess as to why the AL is stronger than the NL in MLB? I don’t see why it should be. Its not obvious how the DH could account for it.
Posted by Bossy_Rules on 12/01/10 at 06:55 PM ET