Re: Hockey East - Who's in, who's out, who's home: by the numbers - 2012-13 edition
Short answer: #2, precisely. Well done.
I had a conversation with him. You can see part of it in the retro links several posts ago. He stated multiple times that they hadn't changed anything. We've covered it multiple, multiple times here every season since it happened. They had no idea that they were doing anything differently. Period. End of story. This is not an Agatha Christie tale, nor a Dan Brown novel. There certainly aren't any Illuminati working on ties at the league office.
If they were competent, yet up to something nefarious, as you suspect, there were a lot of other ways to handle it so as to remain undetected. Among the simplest of those was to say that they had made the decision to change the interpretation earlier in the season. Then there's no story. Denying it just made it more of an issue. Once it was clear that those of us contacting the league knew what we were talking about early on, there were other avenues to take as well - but they kept saying nothing had changed. If they knew what they were talking about, they would have seen that we did too, so denying the change would be pointless.
Also, keep in mind that we're talking about what were moment-in-time tie-breakers with multiple games still to be played, and a press release over whether some team had clinched yet or would have to wait for another game's outcome. This wasn't the end of the season.
Further, press releases aren't legally binding. If they had seen that they had made a mistake with a couple of games to play, they could have always issued a correction. "Oh, wait, our bad. Team X didn't clinch yet. They could still be knocked out on a 5-way tie-breaker with Teams A, B or L, Q, and R (but not if Z is involved), as long as Q and R have two ties instead of splitting 1-1-0. We missed that one. Thanks to the eagle-eyed readers of USCHO for pointing that out."
Most importantly, it's not like they actually iced UMass out of the playoffs or down a seed on BU's (or anyone else's) behalf. They predictively broke hypothetical ties and inadvertently did the math wrong. Ultimately, when all the games were done, all the ties were broken and the results were exactly the same as they would have been in any other season. No one got screwed or benefited from anything.
----
Could someone have benefited? Sure. In fact, had UVM/NU/UMA been in a tie for 7-9, the team that would have been screwed is NU and the team that would have benefited is UMass. As well-documented elsewhere many times, under the old Bottom-Up rules, UMA would be tossed and NU would end up 1st (well, 7th) over UVM. Switching to Top-Down, UVM would be promoted and UMA would take out NU H2H. Bottom-up, it's NU/UVM/UMA and UMA misses the playoffs. Switch to Top-Down and it becomes UVM/UMA/NU and the Huskies miss out.
So UMass benefits from the very rule-interpretation change you're conspiracy-theorying about! How are they getting screwed again?
Or is it that Toot was a BU alum (and he played under Parker... AHA!!!) and all coaches with BU ties have the league at their beck and call? I'm sure that Blaise's years as an assistant at BU had UML getting a bonus somewhere while he was there. Was McEachern an assistant at NU that year, or is the fact that they got "screwed" by this change the very reason they brought him in? Oh wait, he replaced Brendan Walsh - who played at BU before he was at Maine (Parker and Walsh!!!) - on the Husky staff, so that's a wash...
----
Believe it or not, most of the world gets headaches thinking out the whole purpose of this thread, and they're really bad at it to boot - including, apparently, the person in charge of it at the time at the league office.
Sadly, it probably won't be the last time in your life that you'll find that you're more knowledgeable about some topic than the person whose job it is to know about that topic.
Hell, most singers get the words to the pre-game national anthem wrong and most broadcasters don't know how to say numbers over 100 or use the word "literally" correctly. Those (and more) are all true for an unfortunate majority of Americans, it seems, but it's more of an issue for me when it's dropping the ball on a responsibility of the job. If a carpenter doesn't know the words to a song, or a singer doesn't know how to drive a screw, I'm less bothered than when those are reversed.
Don't get me started on the number of years that the same NESN broadcasters would state the same ridiculous and impossible statistics in their annual Beanpot coverage until I finally had to write the station (multiple times with documented proof, of course) to get it to stop.
So: is it possible that the league didn't realize that they had re-interpreted their tie-breaking rules, but a handful of people who use their valuable free time to participate in a thread (much of which is voluntarily written in the wee hours of the morning so people can read it with their morning coffee...) specifically about the multiple variations remaining in playoff seedings and hypothetical ties (most of which will never happen) spotted it first? I would kind of expect it. If you don't yet, you will at some point.
Get used to it.
Addendum:
Here's another difference between how we look at it that should indicate which is the rational approach:
The whole issue matters to me because I care about the principle. I don't care which teams move (note that I repeatedly use the NU example, which has nothing to do with BU). I care about what is fair. It doesn't matter what the rules are as long as everyone knows what they are going into the season. The shootout years were OK because teams could adjust their decisions during the regular season, knowing how the points would be counted. If you screw around with the tie-breaking rules as the season winds down, it steals the opportunity for teams to target their strategies appropriately - and to know when they have to rally-or-die vs hold on for dear life.
I only recognized it initially because it favored BU. In fact, I contacted the league office to explicitly tell them that the team I follow most closely had not clinched yet.
You, on the other hand, have explicitly stated that you are being a total homer. It's a "huge deal" to you because you think UMass was at risk of being screwed and "left out" - and you project that if other people were in your shoes that they would then care - implying that that's the only reason you do care, and if you were in their shoes, you wouldn't.
So your entire argument is, by definition, clouded by emotion.
I, however, was actually knowingly working against my own best interests because I though it was the right thing to do. After a lot of time and (rational) effort on my part, I determined that there was no "there" there. They f'ed up. Honest mistake.
So, using Occam's Razor, which position wins out?
The one that says:
There was a huge league-office-wide conspiracy (because, years later, still no one has leaked it, so they must all be complicit) to turn years of precedent on its head and restructure the league's playoff-decision-making format for the foreseeable future for the sole purpose of giving Jack Parker's BU squad an edge in a hypothetical situation that might never (and did never) come about.
All of the other teams were either co-conspirators or were completely bamboozled by the league's brilliant subterfuge.
The league office would have gotten away with it, too - if it weren't for those meddling kids, er, USCHOers.
- OR -
Three-or-more way tiebreakers can be confusing and most people wouldn't bother to look very hard at them once they get too far out, too complicated, or until they actually mattered after all the games were played - and the person in charge of forecasting in press releases misremembered which arbitrary way - within a poorly-written rule - they had used in the past (and was too busy or lazy or self-assured to check) because the league had NEVER actually had a three-way tie before?
Originally posted by jjmc85
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I had a conversation with him. You can see part of it in the retro links several posts ago. He stated multiple times that they hadn't changed anything. We've covered it multiple, multiple times here every season since it happened. They had no idea that they were doing anything differently. Period. End of story. This is not an Agatha Christie tale, nor a Dan Brown novel. There certainly aren't any Illuminati working on ties at the league office.
If they were competent, yet up to something nefarious, as you suspect, there were a lot of other ways to handle it so as to remain undetected. Among the simplest of those was to say that they had made the decision to change the interpretation earlier in the season. Then there's no story. Denying it just made it more of an issue. Once it was clear that those of us contacting the league knew what we were talking about early on, there were other avenues to take as well - but they kept saying nothing had changed. If they knew what they were talking about, they would have seen that we did too, so denying the change would be pointless.
Also, keep in mind that we're talking about what were moment-in-time tie-breakers with multiple games still to be played, and a press release over whether some team had clinched yet or would have to wait for another game's outcome. This wasn't the end of the season.
Further, press releases aren't legally binding. If they had seen that they had made a mistake with a couple of games to play, they could have always issued a correction. "Oh, wait, our bad. Team X didn't clinch yet. They could still be knocked out on a 5-way tie-breaker with Teams A, B or L, Q, and R (but not if Z is involved), as long as Q and R have two ties instead of splitting 1-1-0. We missed that one. Thanks to the eagle-eyed readers of USCHO for pointing that out."
Most importantly, it's not like they actually iced UMass out of the playoffs or down a seed on BU's (or anyone else's) behalf. They predictively broke hypothetical ties and inadvertently did the math wrong. Ultimately, when all the games were done, all the ties were broken and the results were exactly the same as they would have been in any other season. No one got screwed or benefited from anything.
----
Could someone have benefited? Sure. In fact, had UVM/NU/UMA been in a tie for 7-9, the team that would have been screwed is NU and the team that would have benefited is UMass. As well-documented elsewhere many times, under the old Bottom-Up rules, UMA would be tossed and NU would end up 1st (well, 7th) over UVM. Switching to Top-Down, UVM would be promoted and UMA would take out NU H2H. Bottom-up, it's NU/UVM/UMA and UMA misses the playoffs. Switch to Top-Down and it becomes UVM/UMA/NU and the Huskies miss out.
So UMass benefits from the very rule-interpretation change you're conspiracy-theorying about! How are they getting screwed again?
Or is it that Toot was a BU alum (and he played under Parker... AHA!!!) and all coaches with BU ties have the league at their beck and call? I'm sure that Blaise's years as an assistant at BU had UML getting a bonus somewhere while he was there. Was McEachern an assistant at NU that year, or is the fact that they got "screwed" by this change the very reason they brought him in? Oh wait, he replaced Brendan Walsh - who played at BU before he was at Maine (Parker and Walsh!!!) - on the Husky staff, so that's a wash...
----
Believe it or not, most of the world gets headaches thinking out the whole purpose of this thread, and they're really bad at it to boot - including, apparently, the person in charge of it at the time at the league office.
Sadly, it probably won't be the last time in your life that you'll find that you're more knowledgeable about some topic than the person whose job it is to know about that topic.
Hell, most singers get the words to the pre-game national anthem wrong and most broadcasters don't know how to say numbers over 100 or use the word "literally" correctly. Those (and more) are all true for an unfortunate majority of Americans, it seems, but it's more of an issue for me when it's dropping the ball on a responsibility of the job. If a carpenter doesn't know the words to a song, or a singer doesn't know how to drive a screw, I'm less bothered than when those are reversed.
Don't get me started on the number of years that the same NESN broadcasters would state the same ridiculous and impossible statistics in their annual Beanpot coverage until I finally had to write the station (multiple times with documented proof, of course) to get it to stop.
So: is it possible that the league didn't realize that they had re-interpreted their tie-breaking rules, but a handful of people who use their valuable free time to participate in a thread (much of which is voluntarily written in the wee hours of the morning so people can read it with their morning coffee...) specifically about the multiple variations remaining in playoff seedings and hypothetical ties (most of which will never happen) spotted it first? I would kind of expect it. If you don't yet, you will at some point.
Get used to it.
Addendum:
Here's another difference between how we look at it that should indicate which is the rational approach:
The whole issue matters to me because I care about the principle. I don't care which teams move (note that I repeatedly use the NU example, which has nothing to do with BU). I care about what is fair. It doesn't matter what the rules are as long as everyone knows what they are going into the season. The shootout years were OK because teams could adjust their decisions during the regular season, knowing how the points would be counted. If you screw around with the tie-breaking rules as the season winds down, it steals the opportunity for teams to target their strategies appropriately - and to know when they have to rally-or-die vs hold on for dear life.
I only recognized it initially because it favored BU. In fact, I contacted the league office to explicitly tell them that the team I follow most closely had not clinched yet.
You, on the other hand, have explicitly stated that you are being a total homer. It's a "huge deal" to you because you think UMass was at risk of being screwed and "left out" - and you project that if other people were in your shoes that they would then care - implying that that's the only reason you do care, and if you were in their shoes, you wouldn't.
So your entire argument is, by definition, clouded by emotion.
I, however, was actually knowingly working against my own best interests because I though it was the right thing to do. After a lot of time and (rational) effort on my part, I determined that there was no "there" there. They f'ed up. Honest mistake.
So, using Occam's Razor, which position wins out?
The one that says:
There was a huge league-office-wide conspiracy (because, years later, still no one has leaked it, so they must all be complicit) to turn years of precedent on its head and restructure the league's playoff-decision-making format for the foreseeable future for the sole purpose of giving Jack Parker's BU squad an edge in a hypothetical situation that might never (and did never) come about.
All of the other teams were either co-conspirators or were completely bamboozled by the league's brilliant subterfuge.
The league office would have gotten away with it, too - if it weren't for those meddling kids, er, USCHOers.
- OR -
Three-or-more way tiebreakers can be confusing and most people wouldn't bother to look very hard at them once they get too far out, too complicated, or until they actually mattered after all the games were played - and the person in charge of forecasting in press releases misremembered which arbitrary way - within a poorly-written rule - they had used in the past (and was too busy or lazy or self-assured to check) because the league had NEVER actually had a three-way tie before?
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