Ogopogo*
Guest
moneyp said:I'll use a six-team league to save myself some typing.
The NHL in 1943-44:
Team - GF - GA - Dif/G
Boston - 223 - 268 - -0.90
Chicago - 178 - 187 - -0.18
Detroit - 214 - 177 - +0.74
Montreal - 234 - 109 - +2.50
NY Rangers - 162 - 310 - -2.96
Toronto - 214 - 174 - +0.80
You find the standard deviation for all of the teams goal differentials. Standard deviation explains how spread out the results of any group of data is (further explanation can be found here). I won't print the calculation, which you'd be crazy to figure out manually any way. It's the STDEVP function in Excel.
The result for 1943-44 is 1.69, which is the second-highest result ever (behind 1920). Montreal was great in 1943-44, but the Rangers were actually as bad (even worse) than Montreal was good. Playing one-fifth of your games against those Rangers will make any team look better than it is. So the question becomes, how difficult was the achievement of having a +2.5 goal differential given the way the rest of the league performed that year? That's what standard deviation scores answer.
I explained this on the other thread, but one more time: The math for figuring out standard deviation scores is (A minus B) divided by C.
A = the team's goal differential
B = the mean (or average) of the league's goal differential. Because every goal scored means a goal against for another team, the result for this should always be zero.
C = The standard deviation of goal differentials (as discussed above) for the entire league that year.
Thankfully, Excel has a STANDARDIZE function for this as well. To simplify, it takes the team achievement (goal differential, in this case) and compares it to the spread of that achievement across the league, bringing the extremes of the data into focus.
The SDS scores for 1943-44:
Boston: -0.53
Chicago: -0.11
Detroit: +0.44
Montreal: +1.48
NY Rangers: -1.76
Toronto: +0.47
Montreal's total ranks 70th all-time. They were actually better in 1945, with a +2.14 goal differential and a 1.56 SDS (54th all-time).
The 1944 NY Rangers are the 45th worst team of all-time by these rankings. Maybe I'll post that list at some point.
Thank you.