Tag: hockey

Cue Cards 6-25-13: Hockey and Tennis

stk321064rknCue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Sport: Hockey
Teams: Chicago Blackhawks vs. Boston Bruins
When: Monday night, 6-24-13
Context: Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Finals. The Chicago Blackhawks led the seven game series 3-2.
Result: The Chicago Blackhawks win 3-2 and win the Stanley Cup
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

  • Absolute heartbreak for the Boston Bruins. After a late goal in the third period the Bruins were up by a goal with less than two minutes left. The Blackhawks pulled their goalie (a desperation move) and scored to tie the game. This had to have had everyone in the arena thinking that the game would go to overtime like so many of the games in this series did. The Blackhawks had other ideas and scored again before the end of regulation time to win the game and the series.
  • The end for Jaromir Jagr? Jagr is 41 and played his first year in the NHL in 1990. He won the championship with the Pittsburgh Penguins in 1991 and 1992 and has not won since. Although he played remarkably well for most of the season and playoffs, he got banged up pretty good in this game, and there was a shot of him after the game mourning the loss that had an air of finality and deep sadness.
  • This series was about as good as the NHL could wish for. Two original six teams from big U.S. markets playing incredibly well against each other. This season, which looked to be at risk of not happening at all after the owners locked out the players, ended on a high note for the sport.
  • Of course one of the consequences of the labor problems is that the season ended unseasonably late in the year. It was 95 degrees in Boston today and the ice quality was very poor throughout, particularly at the end of the game when a lot of the important action happened.

What’s Next: Probably a lot of beer for the Chicago team. And the city of Chicago. And I imagine many of the Bruins fans in my life too.

Sport: Tennis
Players: Rafael Nadal and Steve Darcis
When: Monday, 6-24-13
Context: The first round of any tennis tournament is where one expects the expected. It is very rare for anything head-line worthy to happen.
Result: Steve Darcis beat Rafael Nadal in three straight sets, 7-6 (4), 7-6 (8), 6-4
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

  • The surface — we just did a post on this today about how Nadal’s style of play leaves him open at this stage in his career to being upset on grass.
  • Who is this Steve Darcis guy anyway? No really, no one will know anything about him except that he is Belgian and that no one knows anything about him.
  • Nadal’s knee which looked like it was bothering him. Tendonitis in his knees has forced him to miss lots of time in the past few years and it feels more like this is a permanent disability than something which he will one day look back on as a bump in the road. Every loss and every injury for Nadal is therefore analysed as though it may be his last.

Cue Cards 6-24-13

stk321064rknCue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Sport: Hockey
Teams: Chicago Blackhawks vs. Boston Bruins
When: Saturday night, 6-22-13
Context: Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Finals. The series was tied 2-2.
Result: Blackhawks win 3-1
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

  • The cup will be in the house. For the first time, the Stanley Cup will be in the building because if Chicago wins, the series is over. There aren’t many more exciting things in sports than knowing the team you root for can win the championship tonight.
  • Important injuries. Two of the top players in the series, Jonathan Toews of the Blackhawks and Patrice Bergeron of the Bruins were unable to finish last game. In the grand tradition of hockey (the logic is that if you say what is ailing you, your opponent will target that body part in the next game) neither team is talking about what is wrong with their star player. Rumor has it that Toews has a concussion and Bergeron… something with his spleen.
  • Fallen Giant? Zdeno Chara, Boston’s 6’9″ captain, and one of the best defensive players in the league has been on the ice for eight of the last nine goals scored against the Bruins. If Chicago has really figured out how to beat him, they will probably win. 

What’s Next: Game 6 is Saturday night at 8 p.m.

Sport: Basketball
Teams: Boston Celtics and Los Angeles
When: Sunday, 6-23-13
Context: A trade!
Result: The Boston Celtics trade Coach Doc Rivers to the Los Angeles Clippers for a 2015 first round draft pick
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

  • More change coming for the Celtics? The Celtics have had the same coach and pretty much the same star players since 2007. Last year Ray Allen left for the Miami Heat and now Doc Rivers has left for the Clippers. What will happen to aging (or aged) stars Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett.
  • Can you really trade a coach? No, not really — but a team can receive compensation for allowing their coach to sign with another team while under contract. Though people will call this a trade officially it’s not.
  • Most trade conversations follow the pattern of people taking the position “Team A” got the better deal or “Team B” got the better deal. Taking either of those positions (or both if you want to really have fun) will create a good conversation. You can also take the honorable “it’s too soon to tell” position and do quite well. As this trade involves no tangible basketball players, most of these conversations will be about the relative value of a coach and a pick that could potentially fall at the end of the first round, 25-30 picks into the draft.

 

Cue Cards 6-20-13

stk321064rknCue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Sport: Hockey
Teams: Chicago Blackhawks vs. Boston Bruins
When: Wednesday night, 6-19-13
Context: Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals. The Boston Bruins were leading the seven game series 2-1.
Result: Blackhawks win 6-5
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

  • Overtime. Oh my gosh so much overtime. Three of the four games in this series have gone to overtime
  • The high score! There had been 12 goals total in the three previous games. This game had 11 goals. Despite the Bruins losing, of the two goalies, Corey Crawford of the Blackhawks is the more concerning goalie. All five of the goals scored against him got past his glove hand. This is suggestive of a weakness the Bruins can continue to exploit.
  • How much confidence does this give the Blackhawks? Everything that had been going wrong for them in the series turned around in this game. Both their star players, Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews scored goals and they even got their first power play goal of the series (they hadn’t scored in nine attempts against the Bruins before this game)

What’s Next: Game 5 is Saturday night at 8 p.m.

How Does Overtime Work in Different Sports?

Dear Sports Fan,
How does overtime work in different sports? I’ve been watching more hockey this year and I know that overtime in the playoffs is different from overtime in the regular season. Are other sports like that too?
Thanks,
Sonja

Dear Sonja,

To quote the great Kanye West in honor of his latest album, “like old folks pissing, it all Depends.” Each sport has its own approach to how to proceed with competition if the score is tied after regulation time has expired. Like you say about hockey, even within each sport it can differ depending on whether the game takes place during the regular season or the playoffs. So while it may seem like I’m getting paid by the number of times I write “sometimes” in this post, that’s just the way overtime works.[1]
In general, extra time formats in sports (overtime)  fall into a few buckets:
  • Sudden Death: the most exciting two words in sports. This format is so dramatically named because the first team to allow their opponent to score loses the game immediately. This adds a heightened layer of tension that’s pretty much unparalleled. Sudden death doesn’t necessarily mean
    Sports: hockey, soccer (sometimes), football (sometimes), baseball (kind of), golf (sometimes).
  • Extra Period: This is essentially when an extra period of time is added and whoever is leading at the end of that extra period wins. It still involves added tension but doesn’t quite have the audience on a knife’s edge, since a single score doesn’t necessarily dictate the outcome.
    Sports: basketball (always), baseball (again kind of. In baseball they play a full inning, so essentially the team that has its turn to hit first in the inning is playing Extra Period but the team that hits second can be in a Sudden Death type situation.)
  • Shootouts: The ultimate Mano a Mano sports showdown. Each team picks its best payers (five in soccer, three in hockey) and each one gets a chance to score on the opposing team’s goalie. Some dismiss it as a gimmick but – for the viewer – there are few things more dramatic than seeing an athlete alone on the field or rink with the weight of the entire game on their shoulders. Of course if the shootout is tied after the allotted players have shot, you get a sudden death shootout, where the first player to miss costs his or her team the game.
    Sports: Hockey, soccer (in both cases this assumes you make it through the extra periods with neither team scoring and in the case of hockey that the game is during the regular season)
  • None: Although increasingly rare, there are some situations in sport where if a game is tied at the end of regular time the two teams shake hands, walk off the field, and neither team wins. It’s a tie! In the old days in soccer two teams that ended the game in a tie would go home, rest up, and play again in a few days in order to get a result.
You may have noticed that we haven’t covered football at all in this post. That’s because football is so absurdly complicated in its overtime rules that it is deserving of its own post. The college football rules are different than the professional ones… which differ from the regular season to the playoffs.
Thanks for your question and look out for a football overtime post soon,
Dean Russell Bell
Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Editor’s note. Mister Bell is not being paid at all for this post.↵

Cue Cards 6-18-13

stk321064rkn

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Sport: Hockey
Teams: Chicago Blackhawks vs. Boston Bruins
When: Monday night, 6-17-13
Context: Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Finals. The seven game series was tied 1-1.
Result: The Boston Bruins win 2-0.
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

  • The Boston Bruins goalie, Tuukka Rask, who hasn’t let in a goal since the first period of game 2.
  • Blackhawks player Marian Hossa who injured himself in the warm-ups and missed the game. Given what injuries players regularly play through, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him miss the rest of the series.
  • The series got a little rough in the third period once it was clear the Blackhawks were going to lose. How will that effect the next game?
  • Is a Bruins victory inevitable? It’s starting to feel that way after two straight victories, particularly because the Bruins have now won seven of the last eight games. Can the Blackhawks raise their game to match the level of their opponents?

What’s Next: Game 4 is Wednesday night at 8 p.m.

Cue Cards 6-17-13

stk321064rkn

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Sport: Hockey
Teams: Chicago Blackhawks vs. Boston Bruins
When: Saturday night, 6-15-13
Context: Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Finals. Chicago won game 1 in triple over-time and had the 1-0 series lead.
Result: The Boston Bruins win 2-1 in overtime.
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

  • The Boston Bruins goalie, Tuukka Rask, played superbly in the first period to keep the Bruins in the game.
  • This was the second game in a seven game series and both games have gone to overtime. In two games the teams have played the equivalent of three games because of all the overtime needed.
  • In a seven game series, the team with the better regular season record gets four of the seven games at home. Chicago was at home for the first two games and with the series tied at 1-1, the Bruins now have three of the remaining five games at home. They have captured the home ice advantage.

What’s Next: Game 3 is Monday night at 8 p.m.

— — —

Sport: Basketball
Teams: Miami Heat vs. San Antonio Spurs
When: Sunday night, 6-16-13
Context: Game 5 of the NBA Championships. The seven game series is tied at two games apiece.
Result: Spurs win 114-104
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

  • What’s wrong with the Miami Heat. The Heat were favorites because of their “big three” star players Lebron James, Dwayne Wade, and Chris Bosh. Now they are one more loss away from losing the championship.
  • Alternating blow-outs. After a close game one, the teams have traded off winning games by at least ten points.
  • Spur Danny Green who was a highly regarded player in college but before this season a complete flop as a professional has been playing incredibly well. He had 24 points in the game and now has the record for most three-pointers made in the NBA finals in history.
  • Continuity (the Spurs best players and coach have been playing together for more than a decade) and coaching have the Spurs one victory away from winning the championship.

What’s Next: Game 6 is Tuesday night at 9 p.m.

— — —

Sport: Golf
Tournament: U.S. Open
When: Thursday-Sunday,June 13-16
Context: Second of four major golf championships of the year – the four most high profile, prestigious tournaments in golf
Result: England’s Justin Rose won with a score of 1 over par – kind of like being valedictorian with a GPA of 2.5
Sports Fans will be Talking About:
  • The course won. It’s rare when you gather the best players in golf and none of them break par cumulatively over four rounds – but that’s what happened at this and last year’s U.S. Open. Both Opens were won by a player who shot one stroke over par, a pretty mediocre score for professional golfers and an indication of the traditional difficulty of the U.S. Open courses.
  • Tiger comes up short in another major. Tiger Woods is the best golfer of his generation but to be the best golfer of all time he has to break Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18 majors won – he’s currently 4 behind and hasn’t won one since he was caught setting the record for most females slept with by a golfer in the history of one of the world’s most ancient sports.
  • Lefty comes up short again. Phil Mickelson (aka Lefty cause…uh…he’s left-handed) is perhaps the second most well-known American golfer active today. Unlike Tiger he’s best known for his tragic shortcomings in big tournaments, which include 5 previous runner-up finishes at the U.S. Open, several of which occurred in heartbreaking fashion. True to form he started the day leading the tournament but wasn’t able to close and lost by 2 strokes.
What’s Next: The next major golf tournament is the Open Championships, which are played in the UK – this year it will be hosted at Muirfield, in Scotland, July 18-21.

What is "Having the Last Change" in Hockey?

Dear Sports Fan,

What does “having the last change” in hockey mean? Please tell me it has something to do with uniform color…

Thanks,
Bob

Dear Bob,

Hockey is one of a few sports that actually bakes into the rule book a couple of small advantages for the home team. Having the last change is one of those advantages and it means that the home team has more control over who on their team plays against particular players on the other team. Here’s how and when this happens and also a little bit of how a team might use this to its advantage.

Hockey is a completely exhausting game (this is one reason why it’s so exciting, as covered in our earlier post on why people like hockey) and the players can only play for about 45 seconds at a time. Hockey teams are therefore made up of about three to four times the number of players as can be on the ice at any time. Unlike football, there isn’t a break between plays, so when players have hit the end of their 45 second shift they skate to their bench and return to it to catch their breath while another player on their team launches themselves onto the ice to replace them. This process looks incredibly chaotic but is normally pretty controlled (and when it’s not, the team that has messed up their substitution often puts themselves at risk for having a goal scored on them). Periodically there will be a break in the play, usually because either the puck has been shot out of the rink, a goalie covers up the puck, a goal is scored, or a penalty is called. When this happens, both coaches have the opportunity to reflect for a second or two and then choose which players they want on the ice.

Coaches will do anything do gain an advantage, and as we will explain later, you can definitely get an advantage through clever player substitutions. As you would imagine, with no rule in place to legislate such things, both coaches would try to see who the other coach is going to put on the ice and then decide who they choose for their team. As exciting as this would be to watch, the NHL decided to control things with a rule that states:

82.1 Line Change – Following the stoppage of play, the visiting team shall promptly place a line-up on the ice ready for play and no substitution shall be made from that time until play has been resumed. The home team may then make any desired substitution, except in cases following an icing, which does not result in the delay of the game.

The home team will use this rule to their advantage by watching to see when the visiting team puts their best offensive players on the ice and then countering with either their best pair of defensive defense-men or their best unit of defensive “checking” forwards. Conversely some home teams will wait to see when their opponents put their best defensive players on the ice and then scuttle their offensive stars back onto the bench to patiently wait for the visiting team’s players to get tired. Of course a lot of the time a visiting coach will have a pretty good idea who the home coach wants to get on the ice. A lot of it is situational — for instance, if a team is down by a few goals and the puck is going to be dropped near their opponent’s goal, they are definitely going to want some of their better offensive players on the ice. So a visiting coach is pretty safe in putting his best defensive players on the ice — I mean what is the home team going to do? If a match-up is really important to a coach he may be willing to instruct his players to play just until their team gets the puck and then to quickly skate off to be replaced. THEN the other coach might tell his players to do the same. It all has the effect of turning a graceful hockey game into something that looks like this.

If this all sounds a little cowardly or over-complicated to you, you might be right. Home teams in the NHL do win more than away teams (55.7% of the time) but that’s actually not that much compared to the advantage of home teams in other sports like the NBA (60.5%) or even the NFL (57.3%) and neither of those sports have any rules that make life easier for the home team. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe some of the advantages that a home team gets are counter-acted by the simplicity of being the away team and knowing that they cannot dictate who plays against who. There are so many factors that go into the advantage a home team has (emotion, routine, intimidated refs, etc.) that it would be pretty hard to isolate this one… but I’m sure there’s a statistician out there working on it!

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

What is a Public Team in Sports Betting?

Dear Sports Fan (and by that I mean Ezra),

Can you please explain the science behind sports bets?  Specifically, can you explain why my team falls apart EVERY TIME I have what seems to be a reasonable bet going?

Thanks,
Angela

Dear Angela,

Thanks for your question. And thanks for making the same bet over and over again. I really enjoy the lunches that you’ve taken me to! I’ve taken the liberty of translating your question to “What is a public team in sports betting” for the purposes of the title because I think the answer will be found in that concept. First let’s do a little background on what kind of bet you’re making.

The last few years you, me, and a colleague of ours have made a bet at the start of each hockey season where we bet on our own favorite team. The way this bet works is not the obvious one — we do not bet simply that our team will win more games during the season than our opponents’ teams, we bet that our team will perform more better[1] than what is expected of it compared to how well the other teams do compared to what is expected of them. That means that if your team is expected to win 40 games and mine is only expected to win 30, I will win the bet if your team wins 39 and mine wins 31. Despite your team winning more games than mine, your team won one fewer game than expected and mine won one more.

In order to set our expectations, we use online sports books that are setting a line for the total number of points (teams get two points for a win, one point if the game is tied at the end of regulation time) a team will get during the season. As we wrote about in the lead up to the Super Bowl this year, lines are optimized not to match exactly what is going to happen but instead to attract an even amount of money on each side. For our purposes, it will mess up our bet if the sports books think they need to inflate or deflate the point total for a team away from what they think is most likely to get an even amount of money bet on both sides.

The most common scenario where this skew happens is when the significant portion of the general betting population likes to bet on a particular team. These teams are called “public” teams. Public teams tend to be very popular, well-known teams that have had a lot of success in recent years. Perhaps they are a little bit older now, or injuries have weakened them, or some other relatively subtle thing is going on, like locker room chemistry issues or contractual problems. The people who work at sports books know this but they also know that most casual bettors are likely to overrate the team’s success in past years and underrate the effect of these other factors.

This sounds a lot like your Vancouver Canucks, doesn’t it? They had come in first place of their division seven out of the last nine seasons. Their average age was in the oldest third of the league and one of their best players, Ryan Kessler, had shoulder surgery and was going to miss the first few months of the season. The team also had some unresolved issues at goalie where the long-standing starter (and star with diva tendencies), Roberto Luongo, had lost his starting job to a younger, cheaper, and better Cory Schneider. Of course, the other two teams in the bet, the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Boston Bruins, are also probably public teams to some extent. My guess is that the complete hockey mania in Canada (for evidence, recall this amazing article about water consumption during the Olympic Hockey finals in the 2010 Vancouver Olympics) is the trump card which convinces sports books to inflate their lines for your team.

Then again, it could just be a coincidence… it’s only been three years in a row and that’s an awfully small sample size. Fourth time’s a charm…

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Yeah, I said more better. Deal with it.↵

What does "Original Six" mean in Hockey?

Dear Sports Fan,

What are people talking about when they say “the original six” in hockey? Is this some hockey equivalent of original sin?

Curious in Connecticut

Dear Curious,

The “Original Six” is a phrase used to identify the six teams generally thought to be the founding members of the National Hockey League. It’s actually a little more confusing then that. There were other teams before these six but they all disbanded although some have now been reformed. That said, the Original Six: the Boston Bruins, Chicago Black Hawks, Detroit Red Wings, Montreal Canadians, New York Rangers, and the Toronto Maple Leafs are the only teams in today’s league that have operated consistently since the 1920s. For a period from 1942 to 1967 they were the only teams in the league. In 1967 the league expanded to twelve — six expansion teams joined the original six.

The reason you might be hearing more about the original six now is that two of the four remaining series’ in the playoffs feature two original six teams playing against each other. In the Eastern conference, the New York Rangers are playing the Boston Bruins and in the Western Conference the Detroit Red Wings are playing the Chicago Black Hawks.

These six teams continue to have a luster, an elite atmosphere, a je ne sais pas that divides them from the rest of the teams in the league. They are hockey aristocracy, the blue bloods of the National Hockey League. Even though the Pittsburgh Penguins are this year’s favorite to win the Stanley Cup, their series vs. the Ottawa Senators feels indescribably less important than the ones involving original six teams. And it’s not just me. You can see objective evidence in how the the league and their television network partners schedule the games. This weekend they had four games to schedule and gave both the best slots to matchups of the Original Six. Detroit versus Chicago got the Saturday prime-time Hockey Night in Canada slot. Of the two games on Sunday, the favorable Sunday afternoon slot went to New York versus Boston while the Pittsburgh versus Ottawa game goes up against Mad Men and Game of Thrones on Sunday night.

It’s hard to describe why the concept of the Original Six still has meaning. Perhaps it’s that they’ve won so much. Obviously, when there were only six teams to challenge for the Stanley Cup, it’s natural that some of them would win a lot, but the distance between the Canadiens, with 24 Stanley Cups, and the rest is remarkable. The top non-Original Six team, the Edmonton Oilers, won the cup six times and they needed the great Wayne Gretzky to do that! Maybe it’s because the Original Six have remained so consistent in their look. Most of them have resisted the temptation to fiddle with their uniform, preferring to play off their history rather than sully themselves with seasonally popular fads like teal or v-necks. Compare how little the Maple Leafs have changed their jerseys since 1927 to the radical and constant shifts the Vancouver Canucks seem unable to prevent themselves from making.

The thing that I find most remarkable about the Original Six is that it seems like however they were selected, through design or coincidence, they really are the right six teams. In 2012, the original six teams were the six biggest hockey markets as listed in Forbes magazine. According to Forbes, “the sport’s three most profitable teams–the Maple Leafs ($81.9 million), Rangers ($74 million), Canadiens ($51.6 million)–accounted for 83% of the league’s income.” Compare this success to other “original numbered things,” like the 10 original amendments to the U.S. constitution (the second one is definitely unclear and maybe should be re-written) or the 10 Commandments (at the very least, there is debate over how to number them, although the late George Carlin thought the problems went deeper.)

Hope this answered your question and that we become one of your Original Six blogs!
Ezra Fischer

Gifts for Sports Fans: Nesting Russian Dolls

We’re starting a new feature for Dear Sports Fan — gift suggestions for the sports fan in your life. Please let us know what you think of this! Do you ever need recommendations for sports related gifts? How do you feel about giving sports related gifts? We’re thinking we will mostly search for gifts that are a little off the beaten path of jerseys, hats, etc. How can we customize this section for you? Thanks!

Custom Sports Team Nesting Russian Dolls

What says sports and sports culture more than dolls? I saw these dolls first on the Brooklyn Game, a Brooklyn Nets blog that I read. An excited Devin Kharpertian wrote this about the dolls:

These Brooklyn Nets matryoshka dolls, better known as nesting dolls, are… pretty much everything I’ve ever wanted in a Brooklyn Nets gift. Shout out to Russian culture? Check. A recognition by Russian doll makers that Andray Blatche and Brook Lopez succeeded together? Check. A tiny Andray Blatche? All the checks

Not every team has a Russian owner but that’s no reason to think that the sports fan in your life would appreciate these dolls any less. These dolls have a fascinating history. According to Wikipedia, the first set of matryoshka dolls was “carved in 1890 by Vasily Zvyozdochkin from a design by Sergey Malyutin, who was a folk crafts painter in the Abramtsevo estate of the Russian industrialist and patron of arts Savva Mamontov.”

The doll figures usually create a set, like cats, dogs, astronauts, politicians, etc., so the idea of creating one out of a team seems to be a natural fit. Plus they nest. Which means they are fairly compact when a social occasion calls more for white table-cloth and less for a matching set of Kansas City Royals infielders…

The dolls can be purchased on Etsy for $60 which seems to include shipping. If you don’t see your fan’s favorite team, you can order a custom set for the same price. One note of warning — not all the sets seem to have differentiated figures modeled after actual players. For instance, my Pittsburgh Penguins all look roughly like a cross between Evgeni Malkin and Donald Duck.