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Wednesday, January 20, 2010
At what point during the season do teams play for the tie?
Ok, so we’ve seen that a .500 team that plays for the tie with another .500 team being complicit will each be a .750 team, making “playing for the tie” a valuable weapon. The more complicit, the more valuable. No team REALLY behaves like this to this extreme, but as long as it’s non-zero, there’s a net benefit to playing for the tie game-in and game-out. And we see this in very low third-period scoring of tied games: teams just sit back.
Gabe shows that teams also exhibit this behaviour based on where they are in the standings relative to their playoff spot:
Regulation ties are fairly constant throughout the season, until there are about 25 games to play. Bubble teams play to maximize their points in the standings, which results in more regulation ties, and thus more points in the standings. This strategy peaks with 15 games to go and drops off as fewer and fewer playoff spots are under contention.
This is becoming so painfully obvious. Indeed, any hockey fan would have been able to predict this behaviour. What we wouldn’t have been able to predict is the extent of the behaviour. That’s what an analyst does: quantify what we see.
I’m not sure what it would take to make the NHL go to a 3-point per game system. Or any system that is more equitable and doesn’t put BOTH teams in a position to not want to score.
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