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2015 USCHO Posters Poll -- 2nd Half

Re: 2015 USCHO Posters Poll -- 2nd Half

IMO teams that benefit from good coaching and hard work should be rewarded more.
However, the conference tournaments DO reward the teams that come on strong at the end.
 
Re: 2015 USCHO Posters Poll -- 2nd Half

Those who swapped BC & Minny today, what changed? Like most of you I don't see enough games of enough teams to make a reasonable guess. Unlike many though I don't make a guess. But I don't see anything in the last couple of weeks that would have made me think those two teams are what they appear to be. Not that BC should have been (or not been) #2 2 weeks ago just wondering what caused you to move those two.
 
Re: 2015 USCHO Posters Poll -- 2nd Half

As Coach Frost likes to say, it's a "process". If you are not improving throughout the season, you are losing ground to other teams that are.

I'd agree that that's true. However, it has nothing to do with the question I asked.
 
Re: 2015 USCHO Posters Poll -- 2nd Half

1. BC
2. Minn
3. Wisc
4. Harvard
5. Quin
6. UMD
7. BU
8. Clarkson
9. Cornell
10. SLU
 
Re: 2015 USCHO Posters Poll -- 2nd Half

I'd agree that that's true. However, it has nothing to do with the question I asked.
By "process" Frost means a focus on continued improvement. It is much more important to be playing the best hockey you're capable of playing at the end as compared to the beginning. That's all I'm saying, in the context of ranking which takes this into account. Who cares if you're not ranked in the Top 10 in October if you end up winning the National Championship? That's not going to happen if you keep getting worse, while others get better, as the season progresses.
 
Re: 2015 USCHO Posters Poll -- 2nd Half

Those who swapped BC & Minny today, what changed? Like most of you I don't see enough games of enough teams to make a reasonable guess. Unlike many though I don't make a guess. But I don't see anything in the last couple of weeks that would have made me think those two teams are what they appear to be. Not that BC should have been (or not been) #2 2 weeks ago just wondering what caused you to move those two.

I'm a BC fan but I put Minny #1 last week too -- Minny are strong since Christmas, especially with the squashing of a St Lawrence who tied us and have played other good teams very close; BC have won everything but only just. Right at the moment BC have more to prove than Minny do.
 
Re: 2015 USCHO Posters Poll -- 2nd Half

1. Boston College
2. Minnesota
3. Wisconsin
4. Harvard
5. Minnesota-Duluth
6. Quinnipiac
7. Boston University
8. Clarkson
North Dakota
9. Cornell
St. Lawrence
 
Re: 2015 USCHO Posters Poll -- 2nd Half

By "process" Frost means a focus on continued improvement. It is much more important to be playing the best hockey you're capable of playing at the end as compared to the beginning. That's all I'm saying, in the context of ranking which takes this into account. Who cares if you're not ranked in the Top 10 in October if you end up winning the National Championship? That's not going to happen if you keep getting worse, while others get better, as the season progresses.

This still has nothing to do with the question that I asked. Specifically, that was why you assume that performance at the beginning of the season has nothing to do with good coaching and hard work. That was the clear implication of your response that those are the thing that should be rewarded more in the context of weighting the end of the season more heavily than the beginning. I'd still like an answer to that specific question rather than a bunch of evasions.

More generally, there is also nothing in your responses since then that are relevant to the question of whether we should weight the latter portions of a season more heavily than the beginning in the context of a ranking system. Clearly, if one is in the position that Brad Frost is in, in which his team was clearly good enough from the get go to get into the NCAA tournament AND if one is looking at just the ability to win a national title, how strongly one plays in the games in the NCAA tournament is critically important to the point of outweighing other games.

However, that has nothing at all to do with an outside ranking system. Tell me why it is that in evaluating a team over the course of the season, one ought to be more concerned with the last portion of the regular season as opposed to the first. The desire to win a national championship really is a separate question.

And, for what it's worth, pretty much every study done on every sport around suggests strongly that how well a team is playing at the end of the regular season is much less valuable for predicting how a team will do in the playoffs than how they have performed over the entire season. The effect of any momentum that a team might have (which in and of itself has proven very elusive to anyone who has tried to find it) is swamped by the variance inherent in the smaller sample size. Unless there is a specific element that one can point to, such as injury issues, all of the evidence we have suggests that late season games prior to the NCAA tournament aren't any more important than the ones at the beginning.
 
Re: 2015 USCHO Posters Poll -- 2nd Half

1. Minnesota
2. BC
3. Wisconsin
4. UMD
5. Harvard
6. Quinnipiac
7. Cornell
8. BU
9. Clarkson
10. SLU
 
Re: 2015 USCHO Posters Poll -- 2nd Half

1. UM
2. BC
3. UW
4. Harvard
5. Quinnipiac
6. UMD
7. Clarkson
8. UND
9. BU
10. Cornell
 
Re: 2015 USCHO Posters Poll -- 2nd Half

And, for what it's worth, pretty much every study done on every sport around suggests strongly that how well a team is playing at the end of the regular season is much less valuable for predicting how a team will do in the playoffs than how they have performed over the entire season. The effect of any momentum that a team might have (which in and of itself has proven very elusive to anyone who has tried to find it) is swamped by the variance inherent in the smaller sample size. Unless there is a specific element that one can point to, such as injury issues, all of the evidence we have suggests that late season games prior to the NCAA tournament aren't any more important than the ones at the beginning.

Perhaps you could cite the research that comes to that conclusion.

As far as NCAA women’s hockey is concerned, the best predictor of who will win the NCAA championship is the WCHA championship. Only twice has the WCHA champion not gone on to win the NCAA. It is a better predictor than the WCHA regular season championship, which seems to support how teams play at the end of a season is more important than how a team was playing at the beginning of the season.

Let’s jump forward 10 years. It is likely that non WCHA teams will win some NCAA tournament championships, and the WCHA tournament champion will be a less accurate predictor of which team will win the NCAA. This supports the position that recent history is more important than past history as a predictor of which team will win. Indeed, that is what happened last year, prior to last year any team that had won both the WCHA regular season championship and the season ending tournament had gone on to win the NCAA as well.

Sports in general is "what have you done for me lately".

Furthermore, an athletic contest can be looked at as a learning process. Two teams pit their talents against one another. The victor, assuming the two are somewhat close in talent, is usually determined by which one can counter the others application of talent and strategy, IOW, which teams learning process prevails over the other. This applies to the course of a season as well, the team that “improves” (learns how to apply their talent) the most is the one that will prevail.
 
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Re: 2015 USCHO Posters Poll -- 2nd Half

This still has nothing to do with the question that I asked. Specifically, that was why you assume that performance at the beginning of the season has nothing to do with good coaching and hard work.
Eeyore, I never claimed or assumed that performance at the beginning of the season has "nothing to do" with good coaching and hard work. If a team performs well at the beginning of the season - whether it's from good coaching, hard work, raw talent, whatever - they certainly deserve to be "rewarded" by an appropriately high ranking. It's just that over the course of a season good coaching and hard work will have more time to "bear fruit", and your team will be at their best when it counts the most, i.e. in the post season. Getting off to a fast start and being ranked No. 1 in October is great but what matters most is how much you improve over the course of the season and how you finish. That's my main point, and now I'm done here until it's time to post my next poll!
 
Re: 2015 USCHO Posters Poll -- 2nd Half

Perhaps you could cite the research that comes to that conclusion.

Baseball. More baseball. Football. Hockey.

Note: If you search on this for hockey, you'll probably find this study that claims that there is a significant advantage to record over the last ten games of the regular season. Unfortunately, it has a number of flaws that make it unreliable, including not looking at the r-squared of the correlation and not expressing some skepticism when a similar correlation over the last five games of the season didn't exist.

As far as NCAA women’s hockey is concerned, the best predictor of who will win the NCAA championship is the WCHA championship. Only twice has the WCHA champion not gone on to win the NCAA. It is a better predictor than the WCHA regular season championship, which seems to support how teams play at the end of a season is more important than how a team was playing at the beginning of the season.

No, it isn't. We've been over this before and you simply don't understand the data. In one case when a WCHA tournament winner that didn't win the regular season title won the NCAA title, the regular season winner didn't even make the NCAA tournament, making it worthless for any such claim. In two of the other cases, once the WCHA playoffs were considered, the tournament winner actually had a better overall record than the regular season winner. In the last, the records were almost exactly even. The entire season, regular and WCHA playoffs, remains a better predictor than just the WCHA tournament results.

Sports in general is "what have you done for me lately".

This is one of those lines that's so meaningless that it isn't even wrong.

Furthermore, an athletic contest can be looked at as a learning process. Two teams pit their talents against one another. The victor, assuming the two are somewhat close in talent, is usually determined by which one can counter the others application of talent and strategy, IOW, which teams learning process prevails over the other. This applies to the course of a season as well, the team that “improves” (learns how to apply their talent) the most is the one that will prevail.

Sure, you can look at it this way, but I'm an empiricist and if the data conflicts with the hypothesis, as it does in the case of what you've just said, I'm going with the data.
 
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Re: 2015 USCHO Posters Poll -- 2nd Half

It's just that over the course of a season good coaching and hard work will have more time to "bear fruit", and your team will be at their best when it counts the most, i.e. in the post season. Getting off to a fast start and being ranked No. 1 in October is great but what matters most is how much you improve over the course of the season and how you finish.

Except that how you finish the regular season really doesn't matter more than how you begin it in terms of winning the NCAA championship.

I'll also throw out that winning the NCAA championship really isn't some sort of obvious, objective way of determining who the best team is. It is certainly a way of determining it but just because it seems to have the most people that subscribe to it doesn't mean that it's self-evidently true. In fact, in some ways it's a terrible method for deciding which team is the best, since it throws in eight teams and then declares that a sample size of three games should trump the previous 35-40 games. It's the best method only in the entirely circular way that it matches an arbitrary set of rules that people declared is the best method.
 
Re: 2015 USCHO Posters Poll -- 2nd Half

See, I blame the poster who titled this thread and left out the word fun, because without that reminder, fun vacated the thread once things like "citing research," "r-squared of the correlation" and "empiricist" etc. were introduced.

http://replygif.net/i/834.gif
 
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