From BigSoccer:

This is a wacky, wonderful website:

http://www.sportsclubstats.com/USA/M…/Sounders.html

If you’ve been following it for a while it is quite addicting but a bit of a roller coaster ride. Great stats, though.

Thanks David. I aim for wacky and wonderful.

I’ve added CONCACAF and CONMEBOL World Cup qualifying.

Mike gave me the idea months ago, and Alex spurred my on with an email yesterday. Thanks.

I’ll do something for the World Cup when it starts. I don’t plan on getting to the other qualifying groups this time around.

Somethings is broken. I’m off to grab some coffee and then I’ll see whats up. I sound like an addict :)

The historical graphs issue from before is fixed.

[Update: All fixed. The bad numbers this morning where if only 1 team made the playoffs instead of 4]

I’ve been improving the engines underpinnings, to the point where I unintentionally intermingled past weighted data with coin flip data. So, when you look at a team’s weighted chart some of the points are really showing 50/50 data. I probably “improved” other things too.

Things take me longer then I expect. Such is life.

USL is back running again. Thanks Ryan for spelling out what’s new the season:

Team changes: Austin Aztex are new, as are the Cleveland City Stars. Atlanta Silverbacks are on hiatus and thus, not playing. The Seattle Sounders have made the jump to MLS.

That was some wreck at Talladega

Can you track your overall success rate year to year?

I have not done that, but I could with help from some statistician friends.  I imagine it would be the same kind analysis that Bill James used to test his Pythagorean formula that underlies how I estimate a team’s true strength. The formula was fine tuned by David Smyth for baseball and Alan Ryder for hockey.
 

OK, but how accurate is it?

It has 2 limitations:

The first is mostly a technicality. On the NHL Playoff Chances page I show odds for getting each seed.  If I could run the simulation for an infinite number of seasons (instead of stopping at 50 million) you likely would see a few extra 0’s show up under seeds that previously where blank.  You usually don’t care, those new 0’s are 1 in a million long shots, but you can’t use the site to say a team is mathematically in or out. When the page shows “In” or “Out” it just means the simulation never found a case where they missed/made the playoffs.

The second limitation is important.  I play each remaining game by flipping a coin.*  The 50/50 version uses a true coin. Not very accurate. The weighted version uses a loaded coin. THIS IS THE KEY:  If I magically new the precise value to load each game’s coin then every number on the site (the odds, the big games, the what ifs) would be perfectly accurate. But I can’t know that, so for now I load each game’s coin based on the 2 opponent’s records.** Errors creep in when a team’s true current strength is different from what their record implies.

You have to read the numbers with this in mind.  To take an extreme example, the Blues “chance will make playoffs” graph probably dips too low mid-season, because the system does not factor in injuries.  If I were a Blues fan mid season I might say “these players are coming back, I bet they will give us X extra point in the second half of the season. I’m going to adjust Sports Club Stats numbers by looking X points higher up the “What If” table.
 

OK, but, again, how accurate is it?

I don’t know yet. I find it accurate enough to be a useful, interesting tool.  The more I use it the more it surprises me with unexpected results that turn out to make sense.
 

Detail overload:

* For hockey I also give each game a 22% chance of going into OT (22ish percent of games went into OT in 2007-2008).  And I randomly give the winner between 1-5 goals and the loser something less.  I care about goals because it is one of the tiebreakers.  Finally, for the weighted version I give the home team a 4% boost in their chance of winning, to match the league average. (Other leagues have their own values for ot/tie probability, typical points scored per game, and home field advantage.)

** For many sports it is actually based on each opponent’s goals delta because, on average, that is a more accurate reflection of a team’s true strength. And it applies a mathematical trick called “regression towards the mean” to give less credence to records early in the season when few games have been played.  To “load the coin” it uses a mathematical trick called log5 to turn the 2 team “records” into the chance that the home team will win the game.

[Update, morning of April 3]
Yes.
They lost last night and the Canadiens won.
 

[Update, morning of April 2]
The Senators are still in the race.
Either that or Sports Club Stats has a bug. It still saw 2 times out of 50 million where they win a 3 way tie with the Canadiens and Sabres. They can’t miss. :)
To stay in tonight:

• The Senators need to beat the Bruins
• The Islanders need to beat the Canadiens in regulation

[end of update]
 

I see on the web they supposedly are (thanks Jon), but I’m showing them still making it 3 out of 50 million times.

Here is what has to happen:

The Senators have to win out.
The Canadiens have to lose out in regulation
The Panthers have to get 0 wins and at most 1 ot loss.
And the Sabres have to finish with 2 wins, 3 regulation losses and 2 overtime losses.

Which leads to a 3 way tie for the 8-10 seeds between the Senators, Canadiens, and Sabres.
All with 88 points and 39 wins

The next tie breaker:
If more than two clubs are tied, the higher percentage of available points earned in games among those clubs, and not including any “odd” games, shall be used to determine the standing.

There are no “odd games” to remove. They all play each of the others 6 times, 3 at home and 3 on the road:

10/10/2008 Sabres beat Canadiens 2-1 (so)
10/27/2008 Sabres lost to Senators 2-5
11/11/2008 Canadiens beat Senators 4-0
11/20/2008 Senators lost to Canadiens 2-3 (so)
11/29/2008 Canadiens beat Sabres 3-2
12/20/2008 Canadiens beat Sabres 4-3 (ot)
1/6/2009 Sabres beat Senators 4-2
1/17/2009 Senators lost to Canadiens 4-5 (so)
2/6/2009 Sabres beat Canadiens 3-2
2/7/2009 Senators beat Sabres 3-2 (so)
2/11/2009 Sabres lost to Senators 1-3
2/21/2009 Canadiens beat Senators 5-3
3/4/2009 Sabres beat Canadiens 5-1
3/7/2009 Senators beat Sabres 6-3
3/17/2009 Senators beat Sabres 4-2
3/19/2009 Senators beat Canadiens 5-4
3/28/2009 Canadiens lost to Sabres 3-4 (so)
4/6/2009 Canadiens lost to Senators ?-?

Talley those up to get:
Senators: 7 wins, 3 losses, 2 ot losses 16 points Pack your bags!
Canadiens: 6 wins, 4 losses, 2 ot losses 14 points
Sabres 5 wins, 5 losses, 2 ot losses 12 points

Now, come to think of it, I’m not exactly sure what the NHL means by “higher percentage of available points”. My code just uses average points per game. But it’s irrelevant in this case because they all had the same number of games and the same number of ot losses.

Senator win the tiebreaker and make the playoffs.
Or am I crazy?

Yesterday at 5:45 Bob had me on the show!
I was able to be myself, more manic than usual, but myself. My feet were propped on the desk, and sometimes I even remembered to breath. It was fun.

Thank you Bob and Jim.

Yesterday started calmly enough. Dan Blakeley and Mick Kern had me on XM Radio’s NHL Home Ice. It was a blast, but I felt off my game. I was sitting bolt upright. Next time I’ll prop my feet on the desk.

Then Jim Clark publishes an article about the site on Sportsnet. Jim Clark, I have since learned*, is a very respected sports writer. And he is a nice guy. So this is exciting, I’m taking a deep breath, what should I do now. I procrastinate by googling Jim Clark and Rogers Sportsnet. I’m reading the Wikipedia article on a show Jim co-hosts called “Prime Time Sports”. Evidently this show is very popular.

Then the phone rings. It is Ryan, he says “saw the Jim Clark piece, would you like to be on “Prime Time Sports” with Bob McCown?” I’m thinking “I’d love to, but who what now?” If I were a true Hockey fan*, or lived in or near Canada, I would recognize the magnitude of Ryan’s offer. I say “Yes, that would be great. 6:45 tonight, great. I’ll be here”. I hang up and look back at the wiki article and finally make the connection.

Turns out the show runs long and my slot get bumped to next week, but not before Mr. McCown puts in some plugs for the site and some ribs on what a nerd I must be to have the free time to create it. Next week will be an experience. Feet propped.

* I have to come clean to my hockey friends, I’m not yet a true hockey fan. I get into the Hurricanes in a bandwagon way. I grew up playing soccer and watching football, college basketball, and whatever was on Wild World of Sports.

First off, I was on the front page of the Globe and Mail’s sports section!
Thank you James Mirtle.

And then I saw this in OffThePosts (thank you Bruce Garrioch):

Senators GM Bryan Murray referred to a “site on the internet” that owners all look at that tell you about a team’s probability of making the playoffs.
He must have been talking about this one: http://www.sportsclubstats.com/NHL.html

Reading these two just floored me.

Thanks all of you for visiting.