Questionnaire for Montreal believers

Even if it balances out, the team that’s behind wants to generate a high event count, to increase the number of rolls of the dice they get to tie the game up. That this also increases the odds of a goal against — perhaps more so than goals for — is unfortunate, but the tradeoff is worth it; the team that’s trailing can’t win if the score stays tied, so they try to make something happen, hoping it’ll go their way. The ultimate expression of this is pulling the goalie when down by one; that signficiantly bumps up the likelihood of a goal by either side, and while the chance of a goal against against increases far more than that of a goal for, it’s a tradeoff worth doing because the status quo buys them nothing.

Conversely, it’s in the interest of the team that’s ahead to lower the number of events, to increase the odds that the score stays tied.

You can illustrate it with dice rolling. Suppose that you’re trailing by one and you’re given the option of rolling one to three dice, and you score a goal on a 6 and you get scored on on a 1. If you roll one die, you have a 16% chance of tying the game up. If you roll three, your odds of getting more goals for than against are much higher (I’m counting 64/216, but I’m not trusting my math lately). Of course, the odds that you get outscored increase by the same amount, but you don’t get any brownie points for losing by 1 rather than 2.

You don’t increase your expected goal differential (GF – GA), so one strategy would not be “more optimal than the other” if the score was tied. But you do reduce the odds of neither team getting the upper hand, and if you’re trailing that’s a good thing for you.

Generally speaking, teams that are behind have a slightly positive GF/GA ratio, so their strategy is optimal. Obviously, there are many individual cases where this is not true; among other things, bad teams are behind more often than good teams.

Anybody care to wager on this? I’ll give anybody even odds that the Cup final goes more than 4 games. Or is it all just talk? :)

It wasn’t just Halak. It was also, and perhaps mainly, injuries. Markov and Gionta notably in the first half of the season— that’s almost 10 million on the shelf for an extended period, right there. The CHIP numbers for the Habs were among the leaders in the league, alongside teams such as Edmonton and Detroit.

Plus there’s the who-knows-how-much-it-really-matters question of assembling a team with 10 new faces in key roles and a new coach and creating some sort of team out of that. Timo Seppa likes to point out things like how Montreal was 23-15-9 in the last stretch of the season, with Halak taking over the #1 role and Markov returned from injury — and Cammalleri missing for a significant chunk of that, too. Who knows if that would’ve extended to a full season, but that’s a pretty strong pace (96 points) over half a season — and their OT record over that stretch was perfectly ordinary, too.

The tricky part is that Price ultimately is a starter-caliber goaltender too. He couldn’t buy a win because the team would inexplicably score less in front of him (we’re talking Pittsburgh vs. Boston in terms of how much less here, and much of the difference happening on the PP for some ungodly reason) but he wasn’t all that much worse than Halak, especially early.

To wit, the Habs have now played two series and there’s a case to be made that out of the six goaltenders involved Montreal had the two best ones.