By Triumph on Jan 16, 2008

1. Carolina isn’t that bad, they’ve been suffering from death flu and lost Justin Williams for the season.

2. Name a major sport where a weak team can’t fluke into the playoffs merely by virtue of how awful the rest of their division is. The NBA’s about it.

By Earl Sleek on Jan 16, 2008

From the looks of it, I’m not even sure the Southeast is the main story. 13 of the top 14 teams are from the western conference–that’s incredible.

By Steve on Jan 17, 2008

The ironic thing is, the teams tossing out huge contracts typically are in the East. Philly with Timonnen, Richards, and Briere; the Rangers this past summer with Gomez and Drury; Tampa has it’s big “3″ (which obviously worked really well); Boston has Chara; Ottawa has Heatley and Spezza; the Leafs handing cash to McCabe and Kubina.

Makes one wonder what the West has figured out that the East hasn’t (drafting? development?)

I almost wonder if the Eastern teams get taken so far out of their comfort zone travelling out West when they aren’t used to it when they do. Meanwhile the Western teams are quite used to long flights and changing time zones so when they go East it’s not such a big deal. Perhaps long flights are an unrealized AD-vantage… it also explains why the playoff records in the finals aren’t quite so cut and dry… teams don’t travel quite as much in the cup run as they do day to day in the regular season.

You could also toss in the fact that the teams in the South East travel further for Interconference games than the other Eastern teams, WITHOUT a time zone change which is in effect a disadvantage. Hopping on a bus or a 1 hour plane ride from Toronto to Buffalo, Ottawa, or Montreal doesn’t really faze you. Taking 4 hours out of the middle of your day to head north to Toronto for one game before going back home to play a bunch in the South East is a bit different. Just floating some possible contributing factors.

Oh and of course… the East is mediocre and the West isn’t… based on these numbers.

By MathMan on Jan 18, 2008

I’m not going to claim the East is stronger than the West, or anything, but I’m suspicious of these results. Looks like too much weight is being given on the inter-conference play. There’s really not enough games played between the conferences that you can’t be suspicious of statistical models comparing them, especially models that result in lopsided results like these. The sample size is very small, and it really looks like it was given way too much weight in this model.

There’s really three tiers of teams in the East — Ottawa, then a bunch of teams headed for around 100 points (Pittsburgh, Montreal, New Jersey, and Philadelphia), then everyone else.

That middle tier is a combined 14-9-1 against the West, so they actually do match up well against the other conference. (Admittedly, Pittsburgh’s whopping 7-1 Western record skews that a bit.) Your power ranking formula ranks all these second-tier lower than essentially the entire Western Conference minus Edmonton and LA seems pretty exaggerated, IMHO — I suspect it is a combination of the West’s success against the bottom tier of the East, and the fact that these Eastern middle-tier teams have to play a lot against the lower-tier Eastern teams which really doesn’t help their schedule strength, even if they win.

Really, your results would indicate that the *third-weakest* team in the West is somehow better than the *second-best* Eastern team… How plausible is that, really?