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Friday, September 16, 2011
Puck Luck
Great idea from Bob McCown:
… hockey is enveloped by a culture that demands that everything be rationalized or explained ...
... it’s hilarious the way fans react when their team loses a close game. You’d swear the players couldn’t do anything right. And yet, when the same team wins a game by a one-goal margin, it’s showered in platitudes.
So here’s an experiment I’d love to perform sometime.
Let’s take the tape of a five-year-old NHL game—any game—in which the score ended 3-1. Now, let’s edit out the goals and leave all the rest, so that about 59 of the 60 minutes are there to watch.
Now show it to an audience of hockey fans and see if they can guess who won.
I bet they couldn’t, because aside from the moments in which the goals are scored, an awful lot of hockey games are nothing but back-and-forth flow, the trading of chances and puck luck.
To have some fun, let’s try the same experiment with a bunch of reporters. Then, let’s show them the stories they wrote about that exact game.
Most nights in hockey, both teams skate hard, check hard, and go to the net ... And one of them has a puck hit the post and bounce into the net. And the other hits a post and watches it bounce wide. On more nights than you’d believe, the difference is as simple as that ...
In fact, I would say that puck luck, as it is often called, decides roughly half of the close games in the National Hockey League.
Glove-slap: Phil.
Love the idea. Of course, it depends how many seconds prior to the goal you remove. If you have a breakaway and you don’t anything out, then you know there was no goal scored. If you have a breakaway, and you edit out 3 seconds, then you DO know there was a goal scored. If you remove all shots on net however, then you are removing valuable information. I suppose then what you really want to do is to stop the tape after the shot is taken, but prior to any deflections or goalie interaction.
How about for baseball? I don’t think you can do it prior to the ball crossing the plate. Maybe you can. Part of pitching though is making the batter chase the pitch. So, you can’t remove that. Perhaps stop the tape at the point of contact? But I think infield pops should be distinguished from line drives, so perhaps right after the point of contact? But even if you do that, you’ll have the information that you have runners on base. Do you wipe that out too? I think it’s going to be way too hard for baseball. Same for football. In basketball, it’s based in large part on the mechanics of the shot, so again there, I don’t think you can do that experiment.
Hockey and soccer I think are two great candidates for this experiment.
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