from Amazon
Monday, October 19, 2009
Bias against non-english speakers in hockey
Tyler highlights a study, including his tidbit:
I did a quick look at the pts/game of Quebec and [Rest of Canada] RoC players for 2008-09; as I guessed, Quebec players scored more, coming in at .53 P/G to .45 P/G for RoC players. I didn’t control for ice time or anything but I’d bet that more of the guys filling out the bottom of the forward ranks are RoC types.
This is what I’ve suspected, and you can also see it in Canada’s World Junior teams. You have bias if one group of players performs better than another group of players (presuming that the talent distribution is the same for both groups). For example, it’s a certainty that the average black baseball player from the late 40s and early 50s was better than the average white baseball player. When you carefully select only the best black ballplayer, it’s easy to see how the average of this great group is better than the average white guy that includes an all-white bench. The same happened in the NHL when Europeans and Russians started playing there: only the best were there. So, the average of these small groups were better.
The same deal, this time with research, happens with french-speaking Quebecers. By not filling up their rosters with less than average players, it keeps the overall average for french-speaking hockey players up. This is a bias.
There is no bias in MLB, with regards to handedness or birthplace. Players of those groups are fairly indistinguishable, as I discussed last year.