Data Request: Team Playoff Matchups

[Hockey Outsider]

Hi everyone. I’m looking for two sets of data. I’m wondering if anybody knows where I can find it (aside from going to Hockeydb.com or a similar site and just manually copying and pasting it into Excel).

1) The results of the matchups of different seeds in different rounds. For example, how often does the #1 seed beat the #8 seed?
2) Playoff series lengths. What percentage of series end in 4, 5, 6 or 7 games? Does this change significantly in different rounds?

Thanks.

(If anybody is curious, I’m trying to make a playoff pool for some friends where participants are rewarded for making risky picks (ie upsets) and receive fewer points for making safe picks (ie the favorite will win in 6 games. In order to come up with a fair system, I need some historical data to determine the probability of, say, the #3 seed beating the #6 seed).

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[Kyle McMahon]

I don't know anywhere it's actually listed out, but I was curious myself so I checked using HockeyDB and the official guide. As far as I can tell it's like this:

#1 is 17-7 vs #8
#2 is 10-14 vs #7
#3 is 17-7 vs #6
#4 is 18-6 vs #5

Some of those might be off by a number or two if I made a mistake somewhere so you probably want to double check them, but they're pretty close at least.

1 v 8 was about what I expected, as was 2 v 7, because I know that a #7 always seems to upset a #2. What was most surprising is the dominance of the #3 and #4 seeds, because you'd think that those would be more likely to have upsets. Sometimes the #4 seed is the second best in the conference in terms of points, so I guess that's one theory on their dominance. So, will people who take a #2 in your pool be rewarded for a risky pick?

 

[pnep]

2) Playoff series lengths. What percentage of series end in 4, 5, 6 or 7 games? Does this change significantly in different rounds?

PO |F |SF |QF |FIRST
Total Series| 19 |43 |76 |152
end in 4 |6 |4 |15 |19
end in 5 |3 |12 |22 |33
end in 6 |4 |11 |22 |59
end in 7 |6 |11 |17 |41

PO sesons: 1986-2006

 

[Hockey Outsider]

1 v 8 was about what I expected, as was 2 v 7, because I know that a #7 always seems to upset a #2. What was most surprising is the dominance of the #3 and #4 seeds, because you'd think that those would be more likely to have upsets. Sometimes the #4 seed is the second best in the conference in terms of points, so I guess that's one theory on their dominance. So, will people who take a #2 in your pool be rewarded for a risky pick?

Thanks for taking the time to do the research, I appreciate it.

Hmm, this does complicate things a bit. I was hoping for a steady pattern where 1 beats 8 routinely, 2 beats 7 fairly often, etc., and 4 and 5 are practically even. I can't use the results as they are now, so I think I'll do some more research (expand to include previous years and/or results from beyond the first round) and see if there are any patterns. I'll post the results here if there's anything interesting.

PO sesons: 1986-2006

Thanks for the great work like always, Pnep. The data is pretty much what I expected it to be, but it's nice to confirm the facts.