Leafs Riding Regression To Nowhere

by Steve Burtch on Mar 27, 2010 5:08 PM EDT in Maple Leafs Analysis

Ok, so everyone around these parts is in a bit of a mellow state recently. The Leafs are winning games; they're competitive; they aren't letting in as many goals; Phil Kessel is scoring on what looks like a top line; Jonas Gustavsson has won 6 games in a row; the PK is respectable.

Generally things seem positive and the Leafs are likely to catch the competition ahead of them and we can all happily forget about the Phil Kessel trade, and losing the rights to call upon Taylor Hall, or Tyler Seguin, or Cam Fowler, or whoever ends up going where the Leafs WOULD have selected at this year's upcoming NHL entry draft.

Hmm... ok maybe not that last part. You see, even if the Leafs maintain their current point production pace - 0.708 points percentage since the trade deadline - they still aren't likely to catch any of the teams ahead of them. If they maintain that pace for the last 8 games of the year, they'll end up with 11 more points, giving them 77 for the year.

Here are the post deadline point percentages (tongue twister much?) of the teams ahead of the Leafs in the standings that they have much of a hope of catching, along with their number of games remaining, and the points they can expect to gain in the standings:

Team	Pts	Post Deadline Rec.	Pts %	GR	Pot. Pts	Final Pts
PHI	80	4-7-3	0.393	7	5	85
ATL	76	5-6-2	0.462	8	7	83
NYR	75	4-5-2	0.455	8	7	82
CBJ	72	5-4-1	0.550	8	9	81
TBL	72	4-7-1	0.375	8	6	78
FLA	71	6-4-1	0.590	8	11	82
CAR	71	6-4-2	0.583	8	9	80
NYI	70	4-5-2	0.455	8	7	77
TOR	66	8-3-1	0.708	8	11	77

As you can see, the Leafs are unlikely to catch any of the teams ahead of them in the standings easily. The Islanders, Lightning, and Flyers are all playing relatively poorly, and should they fall completely off of the map, the Leafs may have a hope of passing them. Unfortunately, the Flyers have a 14 point lead, the Lightning still score a lot of goals and play against the South East division, and the Islanders seem to excel at screwing the Leafs when it comes to the draft.

While the timing has little to do with all of this development, it should be pointed out that based on their current play, the Leafs have no business expecting to continue to have a .708 points percentage for the remainder of the season. The team has scored 29 goals since the trade deadline, and has allowed an identical total. 6 of their 8 wins have come in OT or the Shootout. They are basically making up for their 1-10 OT/SO record from earlier this season, by regressing towards the .500 play one expects from most teams in shoot outs, and scoring the occasional victory in OT.

Another fault of this method of success is the Leafs keep sacrificing points in the standings to teams they are chasing. If you want to keep close contact with a bunch of teams ahead of you, giving them an opportunity to keep their distance from you isn't going to help in the long run.

As of right now, I would anticipate Florida may dip a bit if David Booth's concussion issues resurface. Philadelphia is suffering from a lack of top end goaltending, and the lost scoring touch of Jeff Carter. It is possible both teams will lose more than they win the rest of the way. Either way things go though, the Leafs likely have more ground to make up than is physically possible.

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Comments

Well that is depressing. But since you wrote this article on PPP, Hurray!

by Redonred on Mar 27, 2010 5:21 PM EDT reply actions

hahahaha

Pension Plan Puppets: A Toronto Maple Leafs blog and a group therapy session.
Like reading thoughts confined to 140 characters? I'm on Twitter too.

by PPP on Mar 27, 2010 6:21 PM EDT up reply actions

this makes my sad hurt, but its ok. i have a plan. it involves a media blackout of anything hockey related two weeks before and two weeks after the draft day. even a kaberle for rick nash dream deal won’t penetrate my media cocoon.

by mick mcgeough on Mar 27, 2010 5:31 PM EDT reply actions

They’re riding it to somewhere…just not some place reflected in the standings….this year (though hopefully next). =)

They better cheer me up with a win against the Rangers tonight.

by Theodles on Mar 27, 2010 5:35 PM EDT reply actions

SO

You’re telling me there’s a chance….. YEAH… I read you…I read you…

Seriously though, I’ve resigned myself to being a lottery pick. Based on what i’ve seen for the last few months, I will give up the rights to Taylor Hall for Phil Kessel.

But i REALLY don’t want to do it twice. The Leafs have not been deserving of playoffs at any point this year, but that 0-8 start just absolutely buried us.

A good PK is Club Truculence's cover charge

by pevans on Mar 27, 2010 6:00 PM EDT reply actions

I’m working on a post for Gustavsson that shows where some of the hurt came from as well.

That and the 1-12 SO/OT record to start.

Pension Plan Puppets: A Toronto Maple Leafs blog and a group therapy session.
Like reading thoughts confined to 140 characters? I'm on Twitter too.

by PPP on Mar 27, 2010 6:22 PM EDT up reply actions

Dion looks like he is gonna take a bite out of Kessel in that picture

Who wants to go to the Olive Garden?

by JaredFromLondon on Mar 27, 2010 6:23 PM EDT reply actions

Hey Steve

Here’s a piece of advice – You and mf37 need to stay away from answering phones at the suicide hotline… damn you and your ‘facts’.

Good stuff – welcome (back?) to PPP!

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

Albert Einstein

by Say *plan the parade one more time*... on Mar 27, 2010 6:32 PM EDT reply actions

The one good thing about our current play, even if we can’t catch anyone, is that Phil is proving that the chances of Hall or Seguin being as good as he is isn’t as big as a lot of people might have thought when the trade was made.

Phaneuf Phever, an upgrade in skill and alliteration!

by Shield on Mar 27, 2010 6:36 PM EDT reply actions

You’re leaving something out…

Hall will have Marc Savard.

by Theodles on Mar 27, 2010 6:56 PM EDT up reply actions

a half dead savard

October 25, 1966. Thank you Lord Kelvin

by Chuck Diesel on Mar 27, 2010 7:12 PM EDT up reply actions

You mean Savard will have Hall?

Phaneuf Phever, an upgrade in skill and alliteration!

by Shield on Mar 28, 2010 3:19 AM EDT up reply actions

Disagree

I disagree with your analysis. Not because I’m some crazy optimistic fan who thinks the Leafs will win the rest of their games and make the playoffs or something, but because I think the whole regression thing can be used (like any kind of statistical analysis) to show whatever you want it to show.

it should be pointed out that based on their current play, the Leafs have no business expecting to continue to have a .708 points percentage for the remainder of the season. The team has scored 29 goals since the trade deadline, and has allowed an identical total. 6 of their 8 wins have come in OT or the Shootout. They are basically making up for their 1-10 OT/SO record from earlier this season, by regressing towards the .500 play one expects from most teams in shoot outs, and scoring the occasional victory in OT.

First of all, who knows what the mean is? What are the Leafs regressing towards? It is a completely different team, so to say that .708 is unsustainable, while pretty reasonable on its face, is not something you can prove by resorting to regression.

Second of all, with respect to OT, if a .500 record is what is acceptable, then that means the Leafs can expect to win their next 5 (after tonight) OT games to ensure we get back to that point. So that would seem to indicate that a high points percentage should continue. Of course, this is a different team, so I suppose you could argue that the 7 in a row is the aberration and we will now regress towards the mean and lose the next 7.

My point is just that you can’t predict the future based on the past, as a general rule, and it certainly doesn’t make sense to predict the future will be the opposite of the past because we are all spiraling towards the golden mean, nor does it makes sense to predict the future of Bozak, Stalberg and Gustavsson based on the past of Ponikarovski, Stajan and Toskala. I realise I’m over-stating your position a bit, but I am not sure how useful such an analysis is for our young team.

Another question would be: how do you decide when a team has hit its equilibrium? When do the first 10 games of the season count as average, and when are they too good, or too bad (so the team has to regress or progress)? It is all based on a subjective assessment of how good the team is, i.e. this is a playoff team, this is a 12th place team, this is a divisional champion team. It is easy to look at teams like Montreal and Boston who have fallen hard in seasons subsequent to winning the conference, and say, oh, they are just regressing to the mean, but maybe they are just different teams, instead of teams that got lucky.

I don’t mean to rain on your parade, because you write good stuff, but I look at some of the stats analysis and I just think: grain of salt…big grain of salt.

by Leaf in Habland on Mar 28, 2010 12:15 AM EDT reply actions

This post is more reasonable that the article. LIH is exactly right in saying the past does not dictate what will happen in the future.

by brewerm on Mar 28, 2010 2:34 AM EDT up reply actions

I'm sorry

but I think you’ve misunderstood the whole point of the headline and article.

There are two points being made in the posting.

1) The team is finally being successful in winning in OT and the shootout after going 1-12 for the majority of the season prior to this. Statistically, the winning percentage in Shootouts and OT is far closer to 50% for the average team, and a winning percentage of 0.077 is unsustainably low for any team playing in the NHL at a reasonable level of competitiveness.
Unfortunately all these OT victories aren’t helping them.

2) The fact that the team is earning so many points in OT wins when they are scoring the same number of goals that they are allowing is also unsustainable over a longer term. Even if it wasn’t, a .708 winning percentage won’t get them into the playoffs anyway… largely because they’re helping the competition by playing 3 point games.

You’re arguing a point that doesn’t exist, and you’re not doing it particularly well either.

I have zero idea what you’re getting at with respect to the performances of Bozak, Kessel, and Gustavsson vs. Ponikarovsky, Stajan, and Toskala since they have very little to do with the points I’ve been making.

Reality dictates that NHL teams in general will not play 1-12 OT hockey all season long. NHL players as a whole are virtually incapable of playing that poorly in OT… most of it is “lucK” for lack of a better term. The up shot is that “luck” eventually turns, and it appears to have done so for the Leafs.

If you want to ascribe that to the new Leafs, by all means go ahead. Either way it’s irrelevant to my point who you want to give the credit to.

EVEN IF THEY CONTINUE PLAYING HOW THEY HAVE (which is unlikely) THEY AREN’T GOING TO CATCH ENOUGH TEAMS TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE. I’m making two points, and you seem to have lost the main one in an effort to argue the second (and far less important) of the two.

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm."

- Sir Winston Churchill

I'm pretty sure he's talking about the Leafs.

by Steve Burtch on Mar 28, 2010 2:56 AM EDT up reply actions

Statistics

has a lot to say about patterns of outcomes. Nobody is arguing that it will dictate the future outcomes. In fact if they did, then the whole realm of individual events would be distorted… which would ruin all of the statistics in the first place.

Here are some examples of what you are arguing though, so you might want to think about it:

Phil Kessel’s season shooting % is roughly 10%. That obviously doesn’t mean he’s destined to score on 1 out of every 10 shots, but I’m betting it also makes it unlikely that he’s going to score on his next 50 in a row… past doesn’t dictate the future after all.

Jonas Gustavsson has a .925+ save percentage in his past 7 games, and that means he MIGHT stop 93 out of every 100 shots. Of course he might suddenly morph into Toskala and allow the next 12 shots he sees go into the net. Is it likely? Not really, but hey, the past doesn’t dictate the future, so maybe we should make room for the possibility?

Stats just describe what’s going on. You don’t have to like the description, but there’s no need to pretend they are meaningless.

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm."

- Sir Winston Churchill

I'm pretty sure he's talking about the Leafs.

by Steve Burtch on Mar 28, 2010 3:02 AM EDT up reply actions

I got the point that regardless of what we do, we don’t catch the teams in front of us. But I disagree that any particular trend, whether it is OT wins or losses, or a particular point percentage based on goals for/against is “unsustainable” as a result of statistics. It’s a human game. There are too many variables to make such a prediction. If you assume that everything stays the same, we don’t catch anyone. That’s easy enough to see from the table. But why assume everything stays the same? You even mention injuries to key players as one of those variables. How can you say that even that is not enough to make up the difference? How do you know, statistically, what the effect of Booth or Carter (who is not injured, but has simply “lost his scoring touch”) will be?

I guess you may be right, but I read your analysis as “if everything goes exactly the way it has gone since the trade deadline the Leafs will still finish last in the conference.” There is just nothing to suggest that things will continue to go exactly as they have gone. Things never do.

by Leaf in Habland on Mar 28, 2010 6:41 AM EDT up reply actions

Ok you get part of the point

But you seem to be missing the fact that I’m saying that things likely WON’T continue to go exactly how they have gone.

Odds are the Leafs will drop off because their current won/loss record in OT is unsustainable, and they aren’t providing enough offense to overcome the opposition with this much regularity.

I would also like to point out that even if Philly drops down to the level of their current slide (1-5-2 in their last 8 of 0.250, they will still pick up 3 or 4 points in the standings going forward. That basically means that if the worst team of the group ahead of us, continues to play their worst, we will end up behind them by roughly 5 or 6 points at the end of the season.

Considering how low the odds were of the Leafs losing 9 straight to start the year, I’d think you’d realize that the odds of Philadelphia doing the same when they are a generally more talented side are even lower.

I personally think we will catch 1 and perhaps 2 of the teams ahead of us, with the odds being in favour (to me) of the teams we might catch being Tampa Bay, Florida, and perhaps the Islanders.

I just don’t think the odds of it are very good, and that is what the recent indications point to. They don’t make it a certainty, they just push my perspective in that direction.

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm."

- Sir Winston Churchill

I'm pretty sure he's talking about the Leafs.

by Steve Burtch on Mar 28, 2010 10:11 AM EDT up reply actions

Regression sucks.

leaf fan stuck in ottawa, a localized black hole that will suck everything in that area to oblivion.

by stucky on Mar 28, 2010 1:26 AM EDT reply actions

I feel like I’ve been saying this for a month. Maybe more.

Getting to third-last is probably as well as they can do, realistically. And that gives them only I believe a 14% chance of winning the lottery, which is as good as Leafs fans can hope for.

The ping-pong ball watch will be great.

Blogging on hockey at Globe on Hockey

by James Mirtle on Mar 28, 2010 2:31 AM EDT reply actions

I suppose we're on the same page then

I read your posting on the price of Kulemin and Gustavsson going up, and I’ve been having a similar discussion on my old blog recently.

I think Kulemin will likely earn around $2.9 to $3 million, and Gustavsson will garner something between $2 and $2.5 million if they both keep playing how they have.

The off season will be interesting indeed.

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm."

- Sir Winston Churchill

I'm pretty sure he's talking about the Leafs.

by Steve Burtch on Mar 28, 2010 3:13 AM EDT up reply actions

Strange timing on Mirtle's article

I can’t help but feel James Mirtle probably shouldn’t have posted on this forum given that “Price tag going up for Gustavsson, Kulemin” was posted on Globe on Hockey on March 27th.

Just seems strange to me that the article’s subject is so similar to Steve’s former blog’s comments section (http://leafs.hockeyanalysis.com/) from the week prior, complete with Cap geek reference.

Hmm

by Tom Laudanski on Mar 29, 2010 6:18 PM EDT up reply actions

Welcome

Thanks for joining.

complete with Cap geek reference

Cap Geek is a pretty standard reference for a blogger like James though.

Pension Plan Puppets: A Toronto Maple Leafs blog and a group therapy session.
Like reading thoughts confined to 140 characters? I'm on Twitter too.

by PPP on Mar 29, 2010 9:43 PM EDT up reply actions

I don't think James' article

was nefarious in any way… and believe me I’ve been plagiarised before.

If anything it’s nice to know that someone in the pro-ranks that I respect (James is one of the better writers covering the NHL IMO) has the same feel for what’s going to happen in the off-season.

Either way, I’d rather read newspaper articles that I can agree with than ones that make my head spin with frustration.

Now, if James wishes to reference me at any point I’d also gladly take that credit in the future… lol

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm."

- Sir Winston Churchill

I'm pretty sure he's talking about the Leafs.

by Steve Burtch on Mar 30, 2010 1:04 AM EDT up reply actions