Ohio State Buckeyes 2018-19

[osualum86]

Re: Ohio State Buckeyes 2018-19

Ohio State is tuning up for a post season run!

Yeah, if we actually make the postseason. I am not a big PairWise guru like some of the others but I think our position at this point would be that we have to win the WCHA Tournament and get the auto-bid. I am proud of the girls for earning the ties and extra points at Wisconsin this weekend, but ties don't move the needle in the PairWise. Case in point, we just tied the #1 team in the country twice this weekend and we actually dropped a spot in the PairWise, from 10th to 11th. We really needed to hold our 2-0 lead today and get the W.

Winning a couple of tournament games next weekend against Minnesota State is not going to move the needle. We'll see what happens, but at the end of the day, this team put themselves in this position with all the losses to teams they had no business losing to. It's alright to drop some games to Wisconsin and Minnesota, but the PairWise doesn't like it when you repeatedly lose to unranked, sub-.500 teams. Having said that, this team has shown that it is capable of beating anyone in the country. It's just a steep hill to climb when we have to take care of our business next weekend, then try to beat Wisconsin in the WCHA Semi-Final, then Minnesota in the WCHA Final on their ice at Ridder Arena. Might end up being a longer offseason than what the team wanted, but if that ends up being the case, hopefully they come back very highly motivated next season to make sure history does not repeat itself. We'll see what happens. This season isn't over yet.

 

[osualum86]

Re: Ohio State Buckeyes 2018-19

Gopher fans hope that Ohio State can keep 'tuning up' for one more regular season game!

Glad we could help.

 

[osualum86]

Re: Ohio State Buckeyes 2018-19

The tipped goal to tie was a thing of beauty, very Pavelski-esque. I got a chance for a quick conversation with what I assumed were Brändli's parents all decked out in the Red Cross jerseys, they were very excited and rightfully so. It was a pleasure to be able to congratulate them on the great game by their daughter. Too bad osualum86 wasn't in town today, or maybe you are bad luck and it worked out just fine.

The way we played this weekend with me not making the trip, I might have to stay away, although I really enjoy trips to Madison. My two favorite trips in the WCHA are Wisconsin and Minnesota. Actually those are the only places I have been in the league (LOL). Been to LaBahn a few times and went to Ridder for the Frozen Four last season. It's too bad we didn't finish the game the right way today. We really needed the PairWise points. Ties apparently count as losses in the PairWise because we actually dropped another spot after this weekend. We were 10th going into the weekend, now we're 11th.

Glad you got to talk to Andrea's parents this weekend! She was amazing. This team has proven they can play with and beat anyone in the country. It's just a shame we lost games we had no business losing this season.

 

[Still Eeyore]

Re: Ohio State Buckeyes 2018-19

We really needed the PairWise points. Ties apparently count as losses in the PairWise because we actually dropped another spot after this weekend. We were 10th going into the weekend, now we're 11th.

Ties count as half a win and half a loss. You dropped a spot because OSU and Providence are really close in RPI, and Providence won the only game they played this weekend, against a pretty good BU team.

There is at least one scenario that gets you into the NCAA tournament without winning the WCHA. It involves:

1) You sweeping Mankato, beating Wisconsin in the WCHA semi, and losing to Minnesota in the WCHA final;
2) Cornell or Clarkson winning the ECAC;
3) Neither BU nor Providence making the HE final, and either BC or Northeastern winning it.

There may be some permutations of this outcome, involving various teams winning and losing along the way, in which OSU is not an at large selection. I didn't put in the amount of time that would be necessary to check very many of them. But there are definitely some versions of this scenario that get you in. The difference between #4 and #11 going into the conference tournaments is just insanely narrow this year.

 

[osualum86]

Re: Ohio State Buckeyes 2018-19

Ties count as half a win and half a loss. You dropped a spot because OSU and Providence are really close in RPI, and Providence won the only game they played this weekend, against a pretty good BU team.

There is at least one scenario that gets you into the NCAA tournament without winning the WCHA. It involves:

1) You sweeping Mankato, beating Wisconsin in the WCHA semi, and losing to Minnesota in the WCHA final;
2) Cornell or Clarkson winning the ECAC;
3) Neither BU nor Providence making the HE final, and either BC or Northeastern winning it.

There may be some permutations of this outcome, involving various teams winning and losing along the way, in which OSU is not an at large selection. I didn't put in the amount of time that would be necessary to check very many of them. But there are definitely some versions of this scenario that get you in. The difference between #4 and #11 going into the conference tournaments is just insanely narrow this year.

"So you're saying there's chance ... YYYYYYES!" Wow, you are a genius with that stuff. Thanks for talking me off the ledge on that.

 

[hockeytilIdie]

The Buckeyes earned a hard-fought second point earlier tonight in Madison with a tie and a shootout win over the Badgers. I didn't see the game on tv, but based on the box score, sounds like Buckeye netminder Andrea Braendli stood on her head tonight. The Badgers outshot the Buckeyes 53-24. Badger goaltender Kristen Campbell stopped 23 of the 24 shots she faced. Buckeye backstop Braendli stopped 52 of the 53 shots she faced ... that would be a .981 save percentage. Both goaltenders were obviously great tonight. Abby Roque opened the scoring for Wisconsin with a power play goal in the first period and that is where things stood for the remainder of the first period and the second period. Tatum Skaggs scored the equalizer for the Buckeyes on a redirect in the third period to tie the game at 1-1. 60 minutes wasn't enough, so the teams went into OT. Neither team could find the back of the net in the overtime period, so the game went to a shootout. Andrea Braendli stopped all three shots she faced and Buckeye Emma Maltais found the back of the net to give the Buckeyes a hard-fought two points. The two teams are back at it tomorrow at 4:07 pm EST.

So how does The Ohio State’s ranking not improve after a weekend in Madison????

 

[Puckdrop14]

So how does The Ohio State’s ranking not improve after a weekend in Madison????

Sounds like ties don’t do much for you. Wins make the difference and they tied two games. Shootouts are not factored into the calculation is what I was told but I could be wrong.

 

[FiveHoleFrenzy]

Re: Ohio State Buckeyes 2018-19

So how does The Ohio State’s ranking not improve after a weekend in Madison????

If the question isn't rhetorical see post #384...

 

[robertearle]

Re: Ohio State Buckeyes 2018-19

Sounds like ties don’t do much for you. Wins make the difference and they tied two games. Shootouts are not factored into the calculation is what I was told but I could be wrong.

No, shootouts do not matter in RPI and Pairwise. The result this weekend is the same to RPI and Pairwise as if OSU had won one game and lost one game.

The other thing you have to realize is how ridiculously close the RPI and Pairwise are right now for five teams - OSU, Providence, Colgate, Princeton and BU. Those five teams all have RPIs within 0.0020 of one another. Those five are essentially 'tied'. Throw BC and their unusual Pairwise win/lose pairs in there, and there are six teams that could finish anywhere from sixth to eleventh. AND a 'bad' upset loss by Cornell or even Clarkson, and they could drop back into that group.


EDIT: for the heck of it as a 'for instance', I used Grant's (fantastic!) Pairwise tool to change an OSU loss to Bemidji into a tie. OSU jumps to 6th as a result. That's how close things are right now.

 

[osualum86]

Re: Ohio State Buckeyes 2018-19

EDIT: for the heck of it as a 'for instance', I used Grant's (fantastic!) Pairwise tool to change an OSU loss to Bemidji into a tie. OSU jumps to 6th as a result. That's how close things are right now.

Thank you for doing the homework on that. Been saying all season that those bad losses to teams we shouldn't have lost to are what has us clear down at 11th. If we would have taken care of our business during the season we would not be sweating it out and scoreboard watching right now. I love our coaches and our kids, but I really hope next season they realize that the games against the unranked, sub-.500 teams are as important as the ones against Minnesota and Wisconsin.

 

[D2D]

Re: Ohio State Buckeyes 2018-19

...I really hope next season they realize that the games against the unranked, sub-.500 teams are as important as the ones against Minnesota and Wisconsin.

That is so true. And yet it's so natural, no matter how strongly he coaches may emphasize to the contrary, for players to look past those unranked, sub-.500 teams. You see this at all levels, male and female.

As the saying goes, “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.” I think this is especially true in hockey, where a bounce here and a bounce there can spell the difference between a win and a loss.

 

[osualum86]

Re: Ohio State Buckeyes 2018-19

That is so true. And yet it's so natural, no matter how strongly he coaches may emphasize to the contrary, for players to look past those unranked, sub-.500 teams. You see this at all levels, male and female.

As the saying goes, “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.” I think this is especially true in hockey, where a bounce here and a bounce there can spell the difference between a win and a loss.

Yep. My Buckeyes found this out the hard way this season and now they are fighting for their NCAA Tournament lives because of it. I did the math ... if this team would have beaten the teams they should have beaten this season, instead of 18-12-2, they would be 25-5-2 and would probably be setting in the top four in the PairWise challenging to actually get a home game in the NCAA Tournament. Last March when this team was setting in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport waiting for the NCAA Tournament Selection Show to come on and wondering whether they were in or not, Coach Nadine had a wonderfully inspirational message for her team to remember what this felt like and moving forward, to control their own destiny. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, that message just did not get through this season. This team is way better than their record. They proved that a number of times this season, but like I said in my last post, they need to come out and play every game like they did last weekend in Madison.

You said something in your first paragraph that is probably true for a lot of teams (looking past the unranked, sub-.500 teams), but as I look around at our league, it is not true for Minnesota or Wisconsin. I don't see Minnesota or Wisconsin losing to unranked, sub-.500 teams. It simply doesn't happen with those two, and that is why there is such a wide margin between those two and the rest of the WCHA. I hope Coach Nadine is able to get our program to that level someday where we don't lose to sub-.500 teams. I know that doesn't happen overnight, and clearly, Nadine has this program headed in the right direction, so I will continue to trust the process. Gonna be an interesting couple of weeks for sure. We need to take care of business this weekend vs the Mavericks.

 

[Still Eeyore]

Re: Ohio State Buckeyes 2018-19

Yep. My Buckeyes found this out the hard way this season and now they are fighting for their NCAA Tournament lives because of it. I did the math ... if this team would have beaten the teams they should have beaten this season, instead of 18-12-2, they would be 25-5-2 and would probably be setting in the top four in the PairWise challenging to actually get a home game in the NCAA Tournament.

Engaging in this exercise without also acknowledging the wins (and ties) you shouldn't have gotten against better teams is woefully misleading. If you assume that a team should always win against one lower in the standings, OSU's hypothetical record is 24-8 (leaving Colgate as a split). That would put you in a better spot for an at large berth, but not a sure thing.

Last March when this team was setting in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport waiting for the NCAA Tournament Selection Show to come on and wondering whether they were in or not, Coach Nadine had a wonderfully inspirational message for her team to remember what this felt like and moving forward, to control their own destiny. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, that message just did not get through this season. This team is way better than their record. They proved that a number of times this season, but like I said in my last post, they need to come out and play every game like they did last weekend in Madison.

This is a fallacy that sports fans often engage in: taking a team's best performances and assuming that this is their true level of ability, and that anything less is an underachievement. It's not true. Teams are going to have days when they overperform as well as underperform. A team's true ability is best expressed as akin to a probability distribution rather than to a point estimate. Trying to determine if they over or underachieved relative to that hypothetical distribution is both complex and, to a certain extent, impossible. It's why the saying, "You are what your record says you are," has a lot of truth in it.

It is certainly true that OSU's performance this year had a lot of variance in it, but I'm not sure it had more than, say, UMD's did. This is another problem with the hypothetical record you construct above, as it ignores the possibility that Duluth seriously underplayed its expected ability in the series you swept. There are too many moving parts here to make sweeping statements.

You said something in your first paragraph that is probably true for a lot of teams (looking past the unranked, sub-.500 teams), but as I look around at our league, it is not true for Minnesota or Wisconsin. I don't see Minnesota or Wisconsin losing to unranked, sub-.500 teams. It simply doesn't happen with those two . . .

Minnesota lost a game to UMD, and Wisconsin lost once to Bemidji. It happens less often than it does for other teams in the WCHA, but it does happen. My guess is that it has at least as much to do with the overall talent level of the teams than it does with coaching advice that is or isn't listened to.

It's also worth noting that Minnesota, at least, was very fortunate to escape with wins on a couple of occasions during the season.

 

[ARM]

Re: Ohio State Buckeyes 2018-19

It's also worth noting that Minnesota, at least, was very fortunate to escape with wins on a couple of occasions during the season.

Theoretically, Minnesota would have lost at SCSU on 11/17 and Yale on 12/1 had its fourth line not been +1 and +2 in those games respectively. I think that's one of the advantages of being a deep team: it's unlikely that all 18 skaters are going to have an off game at the same time. Teams like UMD and Ohio State rely on a comparatively smaller core group to be their difference makers in any game. For an example, look at the number of people each team has who have scored some arbitrary number of goals, like 10 or 8. As much as we fans like to say, "the team had a bad game", it usually is individuals playing below their usual level, not the whole team.

 

[dd17]

Re: Ohio State Buckeyes 2018-19

Theoretically, Minnesota would have lost at SCSU on 11/17 and Yale on 12/1 had its fourth line not been +1 and +2 in those games respectively. I think that's one of the advantages of being a deep team: it's unlikely that all 18 skaters are going to have an off game at the same time. Teams like UMD and Ohio State rely on a comparatively smaller core group to be their difference makers in any game. For an example, look at the number of people each team has who have scored some arbitrary number of goals, like 10 or 8. As much as we fans like to say, "the team had a bad game", it usually is individuals playing below their usual level, not the whole team.

Agree. Exactly how you separate a good and bad coach. Everyone has a bad day now and again. The good coaches wont ride someone having a bad day to death on the ice. They will play those having good days more. Which will give you more players in that 8 to 10 mark.

OSU is easy to read stats wise. In WCHA play only a handful of players are on the plus side and only 4 forwards have more than 10 points (24 games). There was a lot of stats padding against weaker non-WCHA teams yet they still managed to lose some of these games.

 

[ChickHicks86]

Re: Ohio State Buckeyes 2018-19

2 thoughts:

1) Speculating who "coulda, woulda, shoulda" (-Jim Mora Sr.) won this game or that game in women's college hockey (and especially the WCHA) is so much harder than any record or computer rating will tell you. The teams not named Minnesota and Wisconsin are so erratic from week to week that you never know what you're going to get. When you play UMD for instance, are you playing the team that gives the Gophers fits and swept BC and OSU at home, or are you playing the Bulldog squad that split the season series with St. Cloud and was handled by Wisconsin? It's like two completely different teams. How do players and coaches prepare for that?

2) I think ARM nailed it with the reliance on a "comparatively smaller core group to be their difference makers in any game." In OSU's case, when Maltais gets at least a point, the Buckeyes are 18-6-2. When she doesn't, they are 0-6. Similarly when Dunne tallies at least a point, they are 12-7-1, and 6-5-1 when she doesn't. I just picked the top scoring F and D for that statistic, but I think that depth is the biggest difference between the national contenders and the pretty good teams. For a team like Ohio State to get to that national level and stay there, they either need to recruit a team full of elite players every season (not a very realistic goal) or else get really good at developing the players they do have from year to year such that a girl contributes more and more over the course of her career. An individual player (especially a goaltender) can win games, but it is ultimately the teams with a lot of contributing pieces that sustain their winning ways over the course of a season.

 

[osualum86]

Re: Ohio State Buckeyes 2018-19

Great points by everyone. I think I will take a break from complaining about the 12 losses and enjoy the progress the program has made. This program never came close to an NCAA Tournament, let alone a Frozen Four appearance, until last year. This year, we have a shot at making a second NCAA Tournament appearance in a row. I need to get back to just enjoying the ride.

 

[D2D]

Re: Ohio State Buckeyes 2018-19

It would not surprise me at all to see this series being tighter than most would expect.

MSU women's hockey team likes playoff matchup with Ohio State
http://www.mankatofreepress.com/spo...cle_721a27fa-3b62-11e9-9fbf-37c39e0ad48a.html

 

[pgb-ohio]

Re: Ohio State Buckeyes 2018-19

It would not surprise me at all to see this series being tighter than most would expect.

The Mavs have good players and could certainly win or make things close. History suggests it's unlikely, however. Since the Best-Of-Three/Campus Sites Format was adopted in 2006, Home teams have been highly successful. The lopsided tally:
Home Team = 45 Series Wins
Road Team = 5 Series Wins

Further, all but 1 of the upsets have come in the #4 vs. #5 Match-up. The List:
2010 OSU defeats UW, 2-0
2013 OSU defeats UMD, 2-0
2015 Bemidji defeats UMD, 2-1
2018 Bemidji defeats UMD, 2-1

Yes, the #6 Seed has beaten the #3 Seed -- 1 Time in 13 Tournaments:
2010 Bemidji defeats SCSU, 2-1
Interestingly enough, this is the only time that the #6 vs. #3 series has even gone to a 3rd Game. Perhaps somewhat weirdly, the #7 Seed has forced a Game 3 more often. That's happened on three occasions: 2007, 2014 & 2017.

Anything can happen, of course. That's hockey. But if you're looking for a tight series, you should probably focus most of your attention on Duluth this weekend.

MSU women's hockey team likes playoff matchup with Ohio State
https://www.mankatofreepress.com/sp...cle_721a27fa-3b62-11e9-9fbf-37c39e0ad48a.html

Thanks for posting this link!

 

[osualum86]

Re: Ohio State Buckeyes 2018-19

Ohio State gutted out a 3-2 OT win earlier tonight vs Minnesota State to take game one of this best-of-three series. Maverick netminder Abigail Levy was sensational and kept her team in the game by stopping 39 of the 42 shots she faced. Buckeye goaltender Andrea Braendli stopped 19 of the 21 shots she faced. Ohio State dominated the game but had trouble finding the back of the net against Levy, who certainly backed up her WCHA Second Team and All Rookie Team selection. The Buckeyes opened the scoring in this one when Tatum Skaggs found the back of the net at the 5:18 mark of the first period. The Mavericks answered later in the period on a power play goal by Brooke Bryant to tie it at 1-1. With a minute to go in the first period, Lisa Bruno found the back of the net for Ohio State and they took a 2-1 lead into the first intermission. Neither team scored in the second period so the teams went into the final period with the Buckeyes leading 2-1. It took all of 1:26 for Brooke Bryant to score her second of the night and knot things up at 2-2. Neither team would score the rest of regulation so overtime was needed, or, at least an extra 28 seconds. That was all it took for Emma Maltais to find the back of the net and give the Buckeyes a 3-2 win. Give credit to Sophie Jaques who sent a beautiful pass up the ice to spring Maltais and get her behind the Maverick defense. Levy stopped the initial shot, but Emma pounced on the rebound and got it past her for the game-winner. Game two is tomorrow at 3:07 pm.