sirwin31

"The opinion of the uninformed"

Calgary, AB • Canada • 24 Years Old • Male

To the Point

I thought I would have a look at the standings with a change in how points are awarded. I have taken each team's record (prior to games played on Tuesday March 4th) and divided them into Regulation wins and losses, Overtime wins and losses, and Shootout wins and losses.

I have awarded three points for a regulation win, 2 points for an overtime win and 1 point for an overtime loss, with one point being awarded for a shootout win. If there was a tie in the standings, the top position was awarded based on winning percentage, and then win totals; one team from every division is in the top 3, regardless of point total.
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The West originally stood as:


And with the new point system, the playoff seeding is:

Some interesting matchups in both scenarios, some different seeding numbers and Vancouver flips with Nashville.
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In the East, teams go all over the place. Original:

And in the new points system, the same teams are in, but the seeding is quite different:

Again, some interesting matchups in both cases, and no teams get booted/replaced with the new point system.
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So as you can see, although only Vancouver gets booted from either Conference's playoff picture, a very different arrangement on where everybody ends up does occur. In addition, the bottom 5 teams as of right now in the current standings are:
26. Florida
27. St Louis
28. Atlanta
29. Tampa Bay
30. Los Angeles (best shot)

But with the point change, the bottom 5 vying for Steve Stamkos are:
26. Tampa Bay
27. Florida
28. Los Angeles
29. Edmonton
30. Atlanta (best shot)

Atlanta moved from 28th to 30th, flipping with Los Angeles, while Edmonton drops from 25th, originally just outside the bottom 5, to 29th; and St Louis moves from 27th to 18th, because they have gone 0-5 in overtime, and 2-5 in the shootout.

In addition, Atlanta only gains 1 point with the new system, and Edmonton actually loses one point, from 66 to 65.

The average change in points in the West was 17.8, and 17.6 in the East. Without those two teams, the other 14 teams in the West averaged an increase of 19.1 points, while the East increased by an average of 18.8 points. The largest increase was by Detroit of 27 points, while both Carolina and Dallas had 26 points added to their totals.

No one team's winning percentage increases, and both conferences have an average of roughly 0.095% decrease. In the West the playoff teams go from a winning percentage of 0.608 to 0.515 and the East goes from 0.584 to 0.493.

So my conclusion is simple:

Although I am still a proponent of getting away from these 3 point overtime games, and there are stats and data you can pull from this excercise, the truth is the same teams still get into the playoffs. It doesn't even really sort out the so called parity in the league, as with projected standings for a full 82 game season, the 11th place team is still just 5 points back of 8th place, in either Conference, which is no different than our current system.

If you made it this far, thank you, and hopefully there is some debate which can be sparked on this topic with this data - as useless as it is.