Sports and Math: Where Leisure and Learning Meet
From Only a Game:If you need more proof that playoffs don’t necessarily result in the better team coming home with the trophy, consider this. Brian MacDonald, Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the US Military Academy at Westpoint says since 2000 the team with the better regular season record in Major League Baseball and the NFL only won the playoff match-up 50-percent of the time. For the NHL, the statistic is even lower.
Billy Beane and Peter Brand reinvented the way the Oakland A’s evaluated players and Brad Pitt turned their story into the blockbuster movie, Moneyball. If an NHL team sees fit to hire Brian MacDonald, he won’t count wins…or even goals. He’ll start by counting shots, blocked shots, and missed shots.
“I don’t think there’s any coaches that go into the locker room saying, ‘We’re playing really well. We’re down 1-0. What we really need in this period is way more missed shots than we had in the previous two periods,” MacDonald told a full room at the Joint Mathematics Meetings.
MacDonald says shots, missed, blocked, or successful, are indicators of some very important things in hockey, like possession and territorial advantage. And, unlike goals, they’re not usually based on luck.
