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Monday, January 22, 2007
The NHL can learn from Hungary
You may remember the campaign to vote journeyman Rory Fitzpatrick into the All-Star game. I ended that blog entry with:
Hey, if Stephen Colbert can win the contest (but lose on a technicality) to name Hungary’s newest bridge after himself, anything is possible.
Well, what’s happened since then?
Alot! The NHL put their foot down.
While the NHL reserved the right to remove any automated internet ballots, they chose to strip only parts of a ballot. And which part? Why, only the 100,000 ballots of Rory Fitzpatrick. And how do we know all this? Because the NHL released vote totals for the top votegetters, and there was a one-week period where there were 100,000 less votes for one conference’s defensemen than the other, while the votes for the forwards and goalies matched almost perfectly for the two conferences.
Fun links to read on this issue, and also check out all the links that they provide as well:
http://www.slate.com/id/2157741/
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070112.WBhockeyblog20070112135729/WBStory/WBhockeyblog/
http://sabermetricresearch.blogspot.com/2007/01/did-nhl-arbitrarily-void-rory.html
When I run the Fans’ Scouting Report, I have my own process to remove junk ballots. They are very easy to spot. But, I certainly don’t just drop off parts of a ballot. If a ballot is suspect, the whole ballot gets dumped. Programmatically, this is easy to do. And, if NHL.com is any indication, the NHL employs some pretty good programmers. Given that, it is clear that the NHL simply does not take this issue seriously enough to employ a technical solution, and instead picks and chooses what players do and don’t deserve further scrutiny.
I know what most of you are thinking: big deal. But, the NHL should be honest about this.
Recently, Stephen Colbert had his dream of getting Hungary’s bridge named after him squashed. Did Hungary simply remove 17 million ballots cast for Colbert (more than the entire population of Hungary!), or the infamous Chuck Norris? No, they implemented a second round. And, he won that one too. So, how did Hungary spin this? Incredibly, the ambassador of Hungary appeared on the Stephen Colbert show. And, he basically made up some rules that disqualified Colbert.
That was a great move. We all know that Colbert was not going to get a bridge named after him. But, it was great publicity for everyone involved. And, the ambassador of Hungary was very classy. The fun part of all this was to see how Colbert was going to lose out. And, it was a fun thing to watch unfold.
The NHL? It didn’t do anything creative about it. Someone simply stated: listen, next time we release the voting, just drop the leading “1” from Rory’s vote totals. Let’s sweep it under the rug. How utterly boring, and of course, very deceiving.
The NHL should have asked the ambassador of Hungary how to handle the issue.
Using NHL’s own data, here were the results of the voting as of Dec 18:
http://www.nhl.com/nhl/app?articleid=285590&page=NewsPage&service=page
http://www.nhl.com/nhl/app?articleid=285677&page=NewsPage&service=page
Final results are here:
http://www.nhl.com/nhl/app/?service=page&page=NewsPage&articleid=287061#results
As of Dec 18, there were 20,872,150 votes presented from the 106 top vote getters. The final votes totals were 27,184,031 presented for the top 106 vote-getters.
In-between those two dates, there were 546,517 votes added for the Eastern goalies, and 536,405 votes added for the Western goalies. The East Goalies had 10,112 more goalies votes (and obviously 10,112 more ballots)
In-between those two dates, there were 1,615,997 votes added for the Eastern forwards, and 1,582,917 votes added for the Western forwards. The East Forwards had 33,080 more votes, and with 3 forwards per ballot, that’s 11,027 more ballots for the Eastern guys.
With the Defensemen, there were 1,068,997 votes added for the Eastern, and 961,048 votes added for the Western. That difference is 107,949 votes.
Now, we see based on the goalies and forwards that there should have been 10,000 to 11,000 more ballots for the Eastern players than the Western players. So, we expected to see about 20,000 to 22,000 more votes for Eastern defensemen than Western defensemen. In fact, as stated, there were 107,949 more votes for Eastern defensemen than Western defensemen. There are about 87,000 missing votes for Western defensemen.
So, there are two questions:
1 - Why are there 10,000 to 11,000 more ballots for Eastern teams than Western teams?
The answer is likely that the NHL discarded, en masse, all Western votes on that many ballots. Whether it was Canuck-filled ballots or Shark-filled ballots (judging by the huge write-in campain for Sharks, with 225,797 votes for Toskala and Michalek), who knows.
2 - Why are there 87,000 votes missing for Western Defensemen, over and above accounting for the missing ballots?
The answer is almost certainly that Rory Fitzpatrick’s totals were discarded by that much.
***
It’s also likely that the NHL started to discard the 10,000 to 11,000 ballots en masse, as they should and have the right to, and then decided that it was taking too much effort to do so. If all those 10,000 to 11,000 ballots had Rory as one of the defensemen, and if we add in another 87,000 votes that the NHL decided to get rid off my simply putting their foot down (rather than continuing the process of discarding ballots, and not just votes), we get to 98,000 or so votes that Rory lost.
The evidence is right there on the NHL site for anyone to spend 20 minutes on.