Re: Patty Kazmaeir 2017
You'd think the guy that tries to pass himself off as a statistics expert would know to include links to said research. But that's OK, it would be a waste of time to read the garbage that leads you to believe as you do.
All it takes is googling "
Does defense really win championships." As I said, this is something that has been researched for decades. Some of that research is
hockey specific.
Secondly, you'd also think someone well versed in statistics and research would also have some proof of generalizability. Does the "proof" hold water when transfered from the population of the research to women's college hockey?
We don't know. However, given the universality of the findings to date, one should strongly suspect that women's college hockey isn't a counterexample. At a minimum, the burden of proof falls on the person who would argue that it is unlike all of the other sports that have been studied. Absent someone actually providing evidence to the contrary, my default assumption is that it is not a lone exception. As I'll get to below, a cursory look at the results does not suggest that it is an exception.
If you listened to the conversation with Mark Johnson during intermission on Saturday it is pretty clear he thinks defense wins championships. And judging from his comments back in 2012 and 2013, he thought the Gopher defense, not Raty (after all, he had Rigsby), nor the Gopher forwards (he had Knight & Decker) were the Badgers biggest obstacle to WI winning WCHA/NCAA.
History is littered with very successful coaches who didn't understand their sports when it came to these kinds of questions. Indeed, you still have successful coaches arguing that defense wins championships in sports where it has been conclusively demonstrated that it isn't more important than offense. In regards to this sort of question, I'm far less interested in what Mark Johnson thinks than what the data actually shows.
There has been a paradigm shift in women's college hockey, and even at the international level. While UMD, WI, and MN won their championships before 2012 with a potent offensive, since then it has been primarily defense that has determined if a team has what it takes to win the WCHA or NCAA, the exception being 2014 NCAA. When you look at the teams still alive it is pretty clear, they all play defense very well. You can bet the four teams that make it to St. Charles will be the best of the best, defensively.
Well, yes, they all play defense pretty well. However, they collectively also score pretty well. Cornell is the only team in the field that isn't among the top 12 offenses in women's college hockey. Unless the Big Red win it all, the eventual champion is going to be pretty good, or better, at both. A Wisconsin win would mean that the top rated defense won, but it would also mean that the top rated offense won, so it would only serve to prove that, if you're the best at both scoring and not letting the other team score, it means you're pretty good.
Last year, the championship game was played between the #1 and #2 offenses in the country; they finished #3 and #4 in defense. For some reason, the 2014-15 stats aren't available on USCHO, but in 2014, Minnesota and Clarkson were #1 and #2 in both offense and defense. In 2013, Minnesota was clearly the best at both, but their opponent in the national title game had the #6 offense and the #15 defense, while their semifinal opponent had the #2 offense and the #8 defense.
Has women's college hockey had a recent trend where defense is more important? If so, I can't find any evidence of it. In part, that's because you aren't making a coherent argument. You seem to be saying that, because the Frozen Four games have been low scoring, it means that defense is more important than offense. That's not a refutation of what I've been saying. Aside from the ridiculous idea that the 28 NCAA games played since 2012 constitute a meaningful sample, the question is whether a good defensive team beats a good offensive team. On that question, it's far more useful to look at whether teams with good offenses or defenses over the course of the season are more successful in the tournament. The evidence here is that neither provides a larger advantage than the other.
On top of that, you don't even seem to realize that you blew up your own argument. You seem to be resting your case on the idea that, since 2012, teams win with defense. Except, of course, you don't want to include 2014. You can't just discard 25% of all of the data and then claim that you've demonstrated anything useful. And, for what it's worth, 2013 doesn't help your case much, either, so you'd probably be best avoiding half of the data.
As I said: stupid.
