hockey playoff structure

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[Patrick Barron]

From time to time you'll see an assertion that the NCAA basketball tournament is a bad way to determine a champion, because it's single elimination, not particularly fair, and doesn't really prove who the best team is. The Ken Pomeroy:

He's in the middle of arguing for a re-seed after the first weekend, FWIW.

I bring it up because I think the tournament actually does a good job. The point of playoffs is to spit out a worthy champion, and college basketball almost always does. My favorite method to judge championship-worthy teams is a score-blind strength of record ranking. SOR is an attempt to calculate which team accomplished the most over the course of the season, and that seems like the best way to pick a champion. ESPN's version of that stat goes back to 2008. Final Fours since:

YEAR #1 #2 semi semi
2017 #1 UNC #3 Gonzaga #24 South Carolina #9 Oregon
2016 #3 Nova #2 UNC #5 Oklahoma #30 Syracuse
2015 #3 Duke #2 Wisconsin #1 Kentucky #13 MSU
2014 #8 UConn #10 Kentucky #1 Florida #3 Wisconsin
2013 #1 Louisville #2 Michigan #9 Syracuse #17 Wichita State
2012 #1 Kentucky #3 Kansas #9 Louisville #4 OSU
2011 #3 UConn #30 Butler #7 Kentucky #46 VCU
2010 #1 Duke #7 Butler #4 WVU #12 MSU
2009 #1 UNC #4 MSU #2 UConn #7 Nova
2008 #2 Kansas #3 Memphis #1 UNC #4 UCLA

Only one champion in ten years finished the season ranked worse than #3, and surely there's enough wobble in any stat to declare that good enough. Only four times has a team ranked outside the top 4 even reached the title game, and the lone winner from the depths still finished 8th.

Unless Loyola pulls an upset on Saturday, this will continue: Villanova, Kansas, and Michigan are 2, 3, and 4, respectively. Loyola is 21st.

This situation does not hold for college hockey, by the way. Despite having far fewer competitive programs—about 40—KRACH ranked 2015 champion Providence 16th, 2013 champion Yale 13th, 2011 champ Minnesota-Duluth 7th, 2008 champ BC 10th, and 2007 champ MSU 12th. It's little better than a coin flip between a team that can claim to legitimately have had the best season and some rando that just squeezed in. That's why this space rails against that single-elimination tourney while being sanguine about basketball's.

Random Canadian Bo appearance. Fire as per usual:

 

More Jaylen Brown. Brown sat down with Evan Daniels to talk about his recruitment. On Michigan:

Michigan is definitely going to be in the front runner of things. Talking to Coach Beilein, he’s like an offensive genius the way he gets these guys that aren’t really ranked high to be lottery picks in the draft is amazing. It’s definitely something that drew my attention. Also Michigan is a great education school. They have one of the top public universities in America with Cal-Berkeley, UCLA and North Carolina.

He also said that "I took a lot of visits and nobody's basketball programs was as good as Kentucky," so temper that enthusiasm. Rivals is continually throwing cold water on any speculation Michigan might get him, but it sounds like Sam Webb is talking to a lot of people close to the situation while Rivals cites national analyst Eric Bossi.

FWIW, nobody is saying Michigan is a lock or even necessarily a leader: the difference here is between Scout guys thinking Michigan has a legitimate shot and Rivals saying not so much.

UPDATE: Brown told ESPN that he would be going to an Adidas school, flat-out. That would knock out Kentucky, leaving Michigan up against Kansas and UCLA.

Legends update. MVictors talks to Ben McCready, the godson of Bennie Oosterbaan:

Nothing is official, but U-M is indeed evaluating the Legends program and considering changes.

The evaluation is being driven, in part, by feedback from the players.

    McCready’s understanding is that they do intend to maintain the Legends distinction, but are considering honoring those players in a different way.
    All options are on the table including a presence in the stadium to recognize the Legends.

I'm mildly distressed by the "feedback from the players" bit since in the past that's been used as a won't someone think of the children cover for Adidas pandering and the like. Suspect that they don't actually dislike it enough to make a difference. But some sort of in-stadium note that hey, Desmond Howard played here would be nice—with the boxes there is a ton of blank space to act as canvas.

An excellent example of the hockey tournament's absurdity. Providence was literally the last team in the field—if Michigan had won the Big Ten tourney they would have bounced the Friars. They happen to host this year, so #4 seed Providence got to welcome #1 seed Miami.

They won that game in a looney-tunes 7-5 contest in which Miami played with an extra attacker for almost half the third period after falling behind 6-2, then beat Denver the next night and are now in the Frozen Four. This happens almost every year. RIT took out another overall #1 seed in the opener. That's the hockey equivalent of a 16 over 1 upset, something that has never ever happened in basketball but has been achieved by a single small school in upstate New York twice.

Single elimination basketball can be random; it is much less so than hockey. Good basketball teams win almost all their games. Good hockey teams win two thirds. Look at the pro level to see the spread between good teams and bad. Hockey is closer to baseball, where 100 wins—a measly 62%—is considered the benchmark for an excellent team, than basketball, where three NBA teams cleared 70% last year with Indiana a game back of that number.

So Miami has a season worth of a one seed and their reward is to fly cross country to play Providence in Providence in a one-off game in a building that was half empty* even by the inflated official count. I defy you to come up with a system more nonsensical than that. Can't be done.

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Okay, okay, can't be done outside of cricket.

*[Two-day attendance of 14,234 in a building holding 12,400.]

Um? Hockey recruiting coverage is scanty and Auston Matthews is a big deal so let's hold on to this for a brief moment:

Matthews, who is expected to be selected No. 1 in the 2016 NHL draft, will center Heinen and Moore if he chooses DU over Michigan, among others, and the major-junior route.

Later that article reiterates that Matthews's top college choices are those two schools, and reading between the lines it appears that intelligence comes directly from the Denver program. Everett, a WHL team based in a midsize Washington city, has his CHL rights.

I remember. Harbaugh on his CSG presidency aspirations:

Yes, that is a hashtag for "enthusiasm unknown to mankind" that I will be enthusiastically, if ironically adopting.

But the best part of all this is that a Rivals commenter reminded me of the existence of Hideki. Hideki, a contemporary of mine at the university, won the then-MSA presidency in a landslide because he had a silly sign he carried with him everywhere:

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These were the halcyon days in which the the student government's main function was dealing with BAMN so the rest of us didn't have to. We could safely dispatch an amiable man without a platform or a solid grasp of English as our representative, and we were rewarded with petty imbroglios like "that one time the vice president said the president had difficulty communicating and was called super racist":

Wong called for an apology from Secreto for "allowing the election to become a vehicle to foster racism on campus."

Many representatives and constituents said race was not the reason they were unhappy with Tsutsumi"s term.

"My problems are not with his language," said LSA senior Rodolfo Palma-Lulion. "It"s with his ideology."

"I don"t support the attacks on Hideki, but I don"t see them as racist," Kinesiology Rep. T.J. Wharry said. "I can"t understand what my grandparents say but they"re just as white as I am."

Tsutsumi said he felt all attacks on him were politically motivated and that he is "above the fray of party politics."

Drop that mike, Hideki. You clearly had all the vocabulary required to be a politician.

These days the CSG is serious business. It has to fix the athletic department's student ticketing policies, and cannot be solely deployed as a hilarious parody of national politics.

You'll never believe me. It turns out that Nick Saban doesn't care about one solitary thing in this world other than how to win many football games. It's almost like he's a robot programmed to act like a human being… poorly.

Etc.: On gentrifying the stadium experience. Jon Teske highlights. Gundy adapting.

NCAA

the background is devoid of people

College hockey is a lovely little sport with grandiose ideas that have harmed its growth for the past 20 years. For every jam-packed Yost regional with fans going bonkers—some of the best sporting events of my life—there have been ten antiseptic neutral-ice matchups featuring the barely weighted plinko of single-elimination hockey played in front of a crowd that could only be described as "dolorous" if you were feeling exceptionally generous.

The Frozen Four is a successful event that draws attendance from around the country annually; the rest of college hockey's playoff systems are inane at best.

Finally, this seems to be changing. Faced with the stark fact that no one even wants to host the NCAA hockey tournament anymore (ND is hosting this year despite having an odd 90-foot-wide rink because it was literally the only bid for the Midwest), a sensible new face on the competition committee has an innovative idea:

Do what they do in every other sport.

Seriously, though: fixing the worst tournament in American sports would be a personal relief and a step forward for a sport that is stubbornly fixated on playing neutral-site contests no matter how embarrassing they are. Yesterday's attendance at the Joe was scant:

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This shot has people in it, unlike 90% of the sections

This will continue. Matt Shepherd yells at fans for not showing up, but that's a counterproductive point of view. The product sucks. The product wants me to drive 90 minutes round-trip to an almost-empty arena with the character of concrete during the first round of the NCAA basketball tournament. It does not offer me the opportunity to go to a packed and buzzing Yost Ice Arena in the seat I bought all year. (The cokes are cheaper, I'll give them that.)

Calling people bad fans doesn't change any of that. I'm fed up with it—I did not go nor even think of going—and I have had hockey season tickets for over 15 years. If I'm a bad fan, college hockey has vanishingly few good ones.

Fans eventually notice when they are being pooped on. And I don't know how only MLS and WWE executives realize this in American sports, but the fans are a huge part of the show. I will watch chunks of anything that has folks going insane in a little bandbox of an arena. It shows that whatever's going on is important to somebody. Anybody could be forgiven if they tuned in yesterday for thinking hockey meant nothing to anybody.

If you want your championship to be something other than embarrassing, there is an option. Over the three weeks the CCHA tournament used to take, the Big Ten could have three-game home series all the way to the championship, which would make the regular season more meaningful, provide a more meaningful champion, get their players more games, and make vastly more money.

The reason they do not is still mysterious. Wisconsin and Ohio State objected to needing to keep their buildings free for three weeks when a lot of high school championships are being played in them currently, but Minnesota, Michigan, Michigan State, and Penn State all have dedicated facilities with no or little competition for time. They should be able to out-vote the stragglers. That they don't is an indication that the Big Ten doesn't take hockey seriously—something results on the ice have amply proven.

Here is a plan for making college hockey seem, you know, fun:

  • The Big Ten plays all home-site playoff games. People will "attend." This is "good."
  • Two weeks of home-site NCAA regionals, best two out of three. There's already a bye between the regionals and the Frozen Four anyway. For best results, fill with hockey.
  • The Frozen Four continues being itself.

It is not a complicated plan.