On Sat, 8 Feb 2003, Andy Weise wrote:

> At 08:08 AM 2/8/2003 -0600, John T Whelan wrote:

>> ECAC Playoff Possiblities time is starting to heat up; I haven't gone
>> through all the details, but it looks like Cornell and Harvard might
>> have clinched home ice (8th place or better) already.  Would someone
>> with more weekend free time than I care to confirm or refute this with
>> the ECAC Playoff Possibilities Script?

> This is correct. Cornell & Harvard are both 14 points ahead of Colgate
> and Vermont (who are both tied for 8th at the moment) with 7 games to
> play for Cornell, Colgate, and Vermont and 6 league games left for Harvard.
> Thus, both Cornell and Harvard have clinched a tie for 8th place.

Uh, yeah, I can tell that without playing with the script.  In fact
that means Cornell has clinched at least a tie for 7th place.  The
question is whether there's a possibility that they will end up in 9th
place after all the tiebreakers are applied.  I.e., is there a
scenario where everyone but SLU, RPI, and Princeton finishes ahead of
or tied with Cornell, and Cornell comes out at the bottom of that
tiebreaker?

For starters, in order for Cornell not to finish ahead of
Vermont or Colgate, Cornell has to lose all the rest of their games
and UVM and Gate have to win out.

But if we fill in those results, we find Union has two more losses and
is in danger of being eliminated (since they'll have only three other
games in which to get the six points needed to catch Cornell), so
Union would have to win all their other games (except the Vermont and
Colgate ones).

But when we fill in those results, Dartmouth has two more losses (one
to Colgate and one to Union), leaving them only 5 games in which to
get the 10 points they need to catch Cornell, so Dartmouth would have
to win all five of those games.

Given all of those hypothetical results, Yale is left with 4 games to
get 6 or more points and Clarkson with 5 games to get 9 or more
points.  Sounds good, except that Yale and Clarkson play each other
twice.  Yale needs to get at least two points out of those two games
so they can pick up the remaining 4 points in two games.  But if they
do that, Clarkson can get no more than two points, leaving them 3
games to get 7 points.

So I've just answered my own question: Cornell and Harvard have both
clinched home ice, because there's no way for Colgate, Vermont, Union,
UVM, Yale, and Clarkson all to end the season with 26 points or more.

But once again, so folks can play along at home and/or work these
things out when I'm too busy (This one was relatively easy; didn't
have to worry about the tiebreakers and who ends up in the top 4/top
8.):

http://slack.net/~whelan/tbrw/tbrw.cgi?2003/ecac.cgi

or follow the link at http://slack.net/hockey

                                          John Whelan, Cornell '91
                                                 [log in to unmask]
                                     http://www.amurgsval.org/joe/

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