Re: Conference playoffs scary teams
too much spare time...need to get a job
The WCHA, as currently constituted, was actually founded in 1959. It was the MCHL in 1951 and the WIHL until 1958.
The ECAC was founded in 1962.
The CCHA was founded in 1971.
Hockey East was founded in 1984.
The Atlantic Hockey Association was founded in 2003 (as part of NCAA division 1).
Then there's the Ivy League, which is a thing in and of itself and I won't get into it here.
All other things being equal, you'd assume that how likely it would be for a conference to win would depend on how many other conferences there are and how many teams are in those conferences. (I'm assuming here all teams are equally good, and the distribution is truly random, so that any differences are indicative of the quality of the team and the conference it is in.)
Just looking at the years, the WCHA had no rival as a conference for eleven seasons, from 1951 until 1962. They may not have won every national title held in that period, as there may have been independents, or schools that would later form another league, such as BC in 1949 and RPI in 1954. Even if you assign the national championships belonging to teams that eventually formed the league, or are currently in a league, it's doubtful to me that it's a fair method of comparing leagues.
So in those 11 seasons (ten of which held their national championship games at CC's home rink, where the Tigers played for the title four times and won it twice-- no neutral sites in those days) the WCHA won nine times. If you group all teams as "WCHA teams" and "all other teams" you'd expect them to win 50%, although I'd argue that it's debatable whether the assembly of Independent teams really did have a 50% shot at the time; many of those championship games were blowouts of the 7-1, 7-3, 13-6 and 13-4 variety.
So the first decade or so of the last 60 years of hockey history begins with utter dominance of a league that is the only organized college hockey league at the division 1 level, either playing amongst itself for the national title, or wiping the floor with Eastern teams apparently not of the same caliber. The only exception was 1949, where BC played Dartmouth in the final. So the WCHA's national title rate is almost 82%, and should either have been 100% (if you consider that no other conference can win it, since none of the other conferences exist yet) or 50%, if you consider "all non-WCHA teams" to be a conference. It's arguable that these years skew the all-time results in a way that is difficult to account for when attempting to compare the conferences today.
From 1959-1969 the picture is a little different, but not much. The tournament got moved around starting in 1958. The ECAC is founded in 1962, although no member wins a national championship since Cornell in 1967. From the East in those years, only Clarkson and St. Lawrence even make it to a final. In 1960, the National Championship game was held at Matthews Arena in Boston-- between Denver and Michigan Tech.
Denver, Michigan, Michigan Tech, and North Dakota win every national championship in that decade except the one won by Cornell-- in which they beat Boston University. So that's another strong decade for the WCHA, which won 90% of the decade's championships, although that includes 3 seasons where there was no other league, and 7 where that league was an arguably much weaker ECAC.
Things become a lot more comparable in the 70s. Eastern teams win four national championships (Cornell and BU), and more eastern teams make the field (BC and Clarkson). For a five-year span, the tourney is held either in New York or in Boston. The CCHA is founded in 1971 but does not win a national championship this decade. Against one league in its infancy (the CCHA) and one in its second decade (ECAC) the WCHA wins six of ten national championships for a win percentage of 60%-- double what you'd expect the mathematical 33% to be, if every league had an equal chance. (There's been no compensation for league size here-- the league history pages for the WCHA show when schools joined and left, but not all of them do.)
In short, WCHA teams spent three decades winning nearly all of the national championships because they were the first organized league by more than a decade, and the other leagues don't rise their play to a level to even approach having an equal chance to win for the WCHA's first thirty years.
As you point out, the last 20 years, with four major conferences, you'd expect each to win at a rate of about 25%-- or five championships. In that span, the WCHA has won three more than expected (40%), Hockey East two more than expected (35%), and the CCHA exactly as many as expected (25%), while the ECAC has won none.
The "35 titles in 58 years" is not a number that can be compared to anything, because for much too long during that span there were no other leagues at all, or else no competitive leagues. During the period where all four current extant leagues can be said to have been competitive, the WCHA has been more successful to almost exactly the same extent to which it can be said that the ECAC has been unsuccessful, and only slightly more successful than Hockey East (which arguably only came into existence in 1986, but essentially skimmed the cream off the top of the ECAC to form a new league, and then added other members later.) The WCHA's number over 58 years is lifted to 60% by adding in results in three decades in which there was little or no credible, organized competition. The numbers excluding that period come much closer to approaching parity, the ECAC's drought notwithstanding.
For Hockey East to equal the WCHA's all-time national championship winning percentage at 60%, they would have to, as you put it, win 28 of the next 32. I'm sure they'll be willing to make the attempt if the WCHA agrees to disband this year, the CCHA in ten years, and the ECAC ten years after that, just so that Hockey East can have a chance to achieve the same feat under the same conditions as the WCHA did.
too much spare time...need to get a job
