Re: Ahc > wcha
Don't misrepresent my point. I never said AHA was better, I said they are closing the gap and may have already closed it (ie the leagues are approximately equal). And it's because the "bad/mediocre" teams in AHA are clearly better than the bad/mediocre teams in the WCHA. This results in a more stratified conference, which makes it easier for the teams at the top of the stratified conference to compile a higher RPI (since it is based on winning percentage, most of a team's games are played inside of their own conference, and teams are not punished in their RPI for playing truly awful teams as long as they win the game.) Minnesota State's "success" has come almost exclusively in the regular season post-realignment, based on beating teams up within their own conference (their non-conference record was 3-2-1, and they were 0-1-1 against other tournament teams. Not exactly the profile of a #1 seed). I mean, you can scream "fluke" all you want, but maybe if Minnesota State was such a top-tier program they would have found their way to winning a single NCAA tournament game by now?
If you want to measure an entire conference's strength against another, I can think of no better metric than H2H results and inter-conference records, and those two methods provide a snapshot that the conferences are almost dead even at this point. (AHA with a slight small-sample size lead H2H over the last 3 years, and WCHA with an extremely slight lead in inter-conference record). That's not using "fluky" NCAA tournament wins to prove a point (although at some point 7-7 against mostly top seeds over the past 14 years is less fluke and more evidence that the team playing the best in the AHA at the end of the year can play with anyone), that's using regular season results to show that the results on the ice throughout the two conferences have not been much different over the last 3 years.
Originally posted by kdiff77
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If you want to measure an entire conference's strength against another, I can think of no better metric than H2H results and inter-conference records, and those two methods provide a snapshot that the conferences are almost dead even at this point. (AHA with a slight small-sample size lead H2H over the last 3 years, and WCHA with an extremely slight lead in inter-conference record). That's not using "fluky" NCAA tournament wins to prove a point (although at some point 7-7 against mostly top seeds over the past 14 years is less fluke and more evidence that the team playing the best in the AHA at the end of the year can play with anyone), that's using regular season results to show that the results on the ice throughout the two conferences have not been much different over the last 3 years.
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