For over a decade, we've used this thread to keep track of the math and stay away from the woofing and other pointless cr@p.
It's time to kick it off again for this season.
With the switch to 12 teams, Hockey East enters a new configuration that appears to be stable for the foreseeable future. Where we recently used to have 27 league games per season, that also meant a .500 record was 27 points. The league winner was sometimes in the low-mid 30s and sometimes over 40. With last year's switch to 11 teams and only 20 league games per team, we saw how quickly the season started sorting itself out - and how much each league game mattered.
With the total now at 22 league games per team, per season, there are no rubber games in a series. There is no "lose the singleton, but take the series with a home-and-home sweep" save to an early loss. There are four points in each pair and a loss means the best you can do is split later. Of course, the reverse is true, winning the first of the pair means at worst a split.
Coming into this weekend, we now have four weekends left. For those with seven or eight games left on their docket, that leaves about a third of the season to go.
In the posts coming up shortly, we can take a look at how we set the table for this weekend and what's at stake in the near future.
For now, with this short post, at least we have a stake in the ground to start the conversation.
It's time to kick it off again for this season.
With the switch to 12 teams, Hockey East enters a new configuration that appears to be stable for the foreseeable future. Where we recently used to have 27 league games per season, that also meant a .500 record was 27 points. The league winner was sometimes in the low-mid 30s and sometimes over 40. With last year's switch to 11 teams and only 20 league games per team, we saw how quickly the season started sorting itself out - and how much each league game mattered.
With the total now at 22 league games per team, per season, there are no rubber games in a series. There is no "lose the singleton, but take the series with a home-and-home sweep" save to an early loss. There are four points in each pair and a loss means the best you can do is split later. Of course, the reverse is true, winning the first of the pair means at worst a split.
Coming into this weekend, we now have four weekends left. For those with seven or eight games left on their docket, that leaves about a third of the season to go.
In the posts coming up shortly, we can take a look at how we set the table for this weekend and what's at stake in the near future.
For now, with this short post, at least we have a stake in the ground to start the conversation.
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