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Monday, February 22, 2010
How much parity / dominance do we really want in a league?
Women’s hockey is no fun, unless you are a Canadian fan or American fan. Those two teams account for almost all of the championships. The Canadian team has won 193 games and lost 32 (and 3 ties) games for a game-win% of 85%.
Tennis has a similar situation with Federer, who wins 81% of his matches. There are a few saving graces here. One is that Nadal ALSO wins 81% of his matches. And, the long tournaments means that the chance of an upset increases for every round that they have. There are 128 players at Wimbledon, meaning there are 7 rounds. If Federer or Nadal has an 81% chance of winning each of the first 6 rounds, then the chance of each player making it to the final 2 is 28%. If Nadal makes it, then Federer will win half the time. If he doesn’t, Federer will win it 81% of the time. Total odds of Federer winning if he enters a tournament is 20%. If someone knows the actual number, please let me know. I’m going with 20 for now.(Obviously, he has a greater chance of winning thematches in the earlier rounds, and smaller in the later rounds. Even if you make the odds more realistic for the first 6 rounds, like 86, 84, 82, 80, 78, 76, and make it 50/50 against Nadal and 74/26 against anyone else, you still get close to 20%).
Tiger Woods in his career has played in 253 tournaments and won 71, or 28%. (He won 46% from 2006-09.)
That I think is just about the right number, that you want it so that it’s no higher than 30%, and preferably close to 20%. You do want someone to dominate, to be the figurehead for the sport. Having the top seed at 20-25% seems just about ideal to me.
I think the same should apply to team sports, be it Olympic hockey or MLB. If the favorite is about a 3:1 or 4:1 to win the championship, then I think that sets the top-end balance well. If a team or player wins too much, then you need to change the tournament setup to allow more upsets. That means either adding rounds, or subtracting time (make the game shorter, like best of 3 instead of best of 5, or 3 rounds instead of 4 rounds, etc).
So, that’s the question: how often do you want the best player/team to actually win the championship?
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