seventieslord
Student Of The Game
I checked this out to satisfy my own curiosity and thought it may be of interest to someone else.
I always had the perception that, going into a game seven, the team with the advantage was:
1) the home team
2) the team that has the momentum by way of forcing game seven
I decided to test this theory. In the last 30 playoffs (I stopped at 1987, when the NHL began four rounds of seven games), there have been 120 game sevens. Here is what I found:
Favourite forces game 7 and wins: 30 times
Favourite forces game 7 and loses: 15 times
Underdog forces game 7 and wins: 34 times
Underdog forces game 7 and loses: 41 times
From here we can conclude a few things:
1) The favourite uses home ice to their advantage and wins 59% of the time
2) The team that wins game 6 to force game 7 wins 53% with the home ice advantage not considered
3) The best situation to be in is to be the favourite who forced game 7. In these cases you historically have a 67% chance of winning.
4) 63% of the time it is the underdog that forces game 7, indicating that, even though you are up against a stronger opponent, home ice and the "do or die" situation combine to give you a better chance of winning than you'd otherwise have. Or maybe not, since this only counts situations that the underdog was down 3-2 and won game 6. Maybe this just shows that after 5 games are played, there's a 63% chance that the favourite is ahead.
I should also note that I had to go back a while for trends to emerge. Since the lockout it's been much more of a crapshoot, but when the sample went further back and got larger then I started to see a lot more cases of favourites winning.
I always had the perception that, going into a game seven, the team with the advantage was:
1) the home team
2) the team that has the momentum by way of forcing game seven
I decided to test this theory. In the last 30 playoffs (I stopped at 1987, when the NHL began four rounds of seven games), there have been 120 game sevens. Here is what I found:
Favourite forces game 7 and wins: 30 times
Favourite forces game 7 and loses: 15 times
Underdog forces game 7 and wins: 34 times
Underdog forces game 7 and loses: 41 times
From here we can conclude a few things:
1) The favourite uses home ice to their advantage and wins 59% of the time
2) The team that wins game 6 to force game 7 wins 53% with the home ice advantage not considered
3) The best situation to be in is to be the favourite who forced game 7. In these cases you historically have a 67% chance of winning.
4) 63% of the time it is the underdog that forces game 7, indicating that, even though you are up against a stronger opponent, home ice and the "do or die" situation combine to give you a better chance of winning than you'd otherwise have. Or maybe not, since this only counts situations that the underdog was down 3-2 and won game 6. Maybe this just shows that after 5 games are played, there's a 63% chance that the favourite is ahead.
I should also note that I had to go back a while for trends to emerge. Since the lockout it's been much more of a crapshoot, but when the sample went further back and got larger then I started to see a lot more cases of favourites winning.
