Why has UM underperformed when compared to any comparable stretch in its history? Maybe they had so much success in a five year period that this is just the universe evening things out. Personally, I remember a lot of blown leads resulting in those one-goal losses,
There's a funny thing about leads. In order for it to be possible to blow one, you had to build it first. For some reason, we have collectively decided that it's better to lose by one goal if you never had a lead than it is if you did. I have never heard a good argument for why that is.
It largely stems from our need to turn sports into a morality play. People don't like the idea that the reason why one team wins and the other loses is usually because the first team is bigger, faster, and more skilled than the second. Given the how much emotion we invest into rooting, we want to believe that winning is the product of virtues rather than talent. Sometimes, the gap in raw ability is too big to ignore, but when things are closely matched, we ascribe victory to one team
wanting it more, or the losing team
choking.
In the case of blown leads, the arguments are usually that the team that comes from behind
never gave up, which is virtuous. The team that loses despite having a lead
got complacent, or some other euphemism for not trying their best once they got the lead. Most often, though, it's just the order of events without impinging on anyone's effort level.
It is definitely the case that rooting for the team that comes from behind is more exciting than is rooting for a team that barely holds on. But reading anything beyond that about a the quality of a team's performance is generally a mistake. But that's not a satisfying narrative, so we ignore it.
Defensively, they haven't been as good as when they had a benchmark program.
No, they haven't been. But that's a strawman.
Maybe it's because they don't possess the puck as often as they once did; I'm not smart enough to do know.
Another strawman. At least try refuting arguments I made, rather than ones that I explicitly did not. After all, my original comment included, "There's no question that Minnesota hasn't had particularly good regular season teams relative to their previous performances. "
I thought only in 2019 and 2023 did they have a realistic chance at a title. Wisconsin outplayed them in total in 2019, and when it mattered most in 2023. I won't blame any droughts on snakes.
Wisconsin did not outplay Minnesota "when it mattered most" in 2023. This, again, is the path dependency fallacy. In terms of winning or losing, every one of the 60 or more minutes of a game is as important as every other minute. The only reason Wisconsin had to play better at the end is that they failed to play well enough earlier on.
Minnesota had several razor close chances late in that game and overtime. If one of them had gone in, you'd be writing a very different just-so story, despite the fact that almost nothing in terms of actual performance would have been different.
And now I'm going to quote some of the research you mock. Winning close games is very rarely a repeatable skill. A team's record in one score games (one run in baseball; one goal in hockey; a touchdown or less in football) is not predictive of whether they will continue to win one score games. If you want to know which teams are likely to be better in the next season than they were this season, one of the key metrics is their record in one score games. If they had a terrible record in those games this year, they are likely to have a better record, both in close games and overall, next year. A team that had an outstanding record in close games is probably going to be worse. There are a few things (a baseball team with an elite bullpen; a basketball team with elite free throw shooters; being coached by Mike Tomlin) that can give a team a
small edge in close games, but those outcomes are pretty close to random.
www.sfgate.com
by Jim Glass Do Teams that Lose Clutch Games The Win More in the Playoffs -- and that Win Clutch Games, Lose More? "Great teams win close g...
community.advancednflstats.com
Apologies for walking on trodden ground. None of what’s below is new. Many of you already know everything in here, but I feel like this is a good opportunity to review why our position is our position.
blogs.fangraphs.com
Eleven games is too small a sample size to really generate robust results. But the evidence that we have suggests that the Gophers really have been unfortunate to have produced a losing record over that stretch.