I was going over my usual processing this morning and discovered the worst division in the West is better than the best division in the East. The numbers below are winning percentages assuming overtimes are a coin toss, so the only thing that matters is regulation wins. I use a Colley Matrix to do the ranking of teams
Northwest: 53.1%
Worst goal differential a -6 for the Oilers (-4 Vancouver)
Central: 51.8%
Worst division in the west, Nashville and Detroit have taken over and the rest of the teams are giving up.
Pacific: 56.3%
Stars appear to be falling, but other than that the bottom teams in this division would do a lot better if they weren't in this division.
Atlantic: 42.3%
Only one team has a significant positive goal differential (New Jersey)
Northeast: 51.3%
It's really too bad this division will likely only send 3 teams to the playoffs.
Southeast: 45.2%
It's strange to see the southeast division as better than the Atlantic, but 45% isn't great. Best goal differential is +4 (Carolina)
The West vs. East works out to:
42W - 13 OTW - 7 OTL - 30 L (42/72 = 58%)
1 comment:
This is completely consistent with my power rankings too. I have (as of last Tuesday) Pittsburgh as the second best team in the Atlantic division but only the 22nd in the whole league. I also have 9 of the top 11 teams being from the western conference (only Buffalo and New Jersey from the east made it). This would explain why the west has a 52-30-7 record against the east.
And it all comes down to defense and goaltending because most of the top offensive players in the NHL are in the east. The top 7 point producers are in the east (Crosby, Ovechkin, Heatley, St. Louis, Lecavalier, Jagr, Hossa) and 8 of the bottom 10 teams in goals for per game are from the west.
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