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Typically a team sees about 12 back to back games and plays against 12 teams who played the day before. Nashville lucked out this season. They are scheduled to play 24 games (30% of the season) against tired teams [listed to the left] and play only 10 back to back games themselves.
Generally I argue that these games have a cost of about 5% in terms of winning percentage or 0.05 wins. So Nashville loses 0.50 games in the 10 games they play back to back and gains 1.2 wins in the 24 games they play against a back to back team. In essence the NHL has given Nashville 1.5 extra points. (this is worth approximately $700,000). Of course this isn't huge, but essentially Nashville has a 1.5 point advantage before the season starts.
It's interesting, but the majority of these games are in the first half of the season, possibly to get the team an early lead and to attract attention to the team. For example, Nashville plays tired teams for a whole week: Dec 6 to Dec 13.
Last season the NHL was very good at making sure back to back games were scheduled fairly and the largest difference was 5 (Col, S.J, NYI)
1 comment:
Following a season in which the Oilers missed the playoffs by just a point or two, I remember Kevin Lowe complaining that they had intentionally scheduled too many home back to back games. This was done for the Oiler's business ops guys, who wanted to boost sales using weekender packages. Presumably targeting out of town fans.
He had a point, though playing extra B2Bs means there are more games played with 2 days rest in there as well, so you get some of it back. Still, when you miss the dance by a point ... an extra win means a lot.
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