Thursday, March 16, 2006

Because deep down you wanted to know

I was over at Hockeyfights.com today and saw that Ottawa leads the Eastern Conference in fighting majors this year. Naturally, I wanted to know if there was any type of relationship between fighting majors and place in the standings so I plotted them out.
The answer is no.

6 comments:

  1. My thesis had a chart that looked like that. Wrote 90 pages about it. "no" was my conclusion too.

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  2. I see 3 distinct zones, but maybe I've had too many coffees.

    At the top you have teams that either fight a lot (yeah we're tough, we'll take all comers) or not at all (hey, we're beyond that -- winning is just dandy thank you).

    In the middle you have, well the middle. Average in every way. Win some games, lose some games. Win some fights, lose some fights.

    At the bottom you have teams who are so ridiculously out of contention that the only joy left for the players or the fans is to take out the frustration in fights.

    I know that's reading a lot into the data, but hey I can give uniformed opinion with the best of them. :)

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  3. The most interesting point I think is the fact the Western Conference has many more majors than the East.

    They use the same refs, right?

    The other thing would be how far off Detroit is from the rest of the West.

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  4. It's definitley due to the fact that the West is a much closer conference than the East this year.

    What's Ottawa's record against the west this year... just from memory I think they've lost to VAN, EDM and ANA.


    Not sure about the Detroit thing though...

    No McCarty I guess?

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  5. If you squint your eyes, you can see Chara rag-dolling McCabe

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  6. I think if you look at the overall tagging, it looks like there is no correlation across, the league, but if you look at the conferences separately, there is a trend. Dallas, Ottawa and Detroit appear to be outliers, but otherwise there is a trend of slightly more points for less fighting.

    don, last I checked the refs did not instigate fights, but merely reported them.

    As for the Sens, there seems to be a lot of trash-talking here for a team without a starting goaltender, any sort of strength at center, or any resemblence of recent success in the playoffs. Here's to Fats Arnason, boys! Good luck.

    I'd still take the Leafs in a seven game series.

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