On Feb 5, 19:15, Mike Machnik wrote:
>Spoke to Ed McLaughlin of HE about this today.  Here are the tiebreakers.
>
>TWO TEAMS
>1 Head-to-head won-loss record
>2 League wins
>3 Won-loss record vs HE teams
>4 Record vs. teams, descending order
>5 Coin flip
>
>THREE OR MORE TEAMS
>Apply the two team tiebreakers to all teams.  I.e. if three teams are tied,
>first look at head-to-head won-loss among all three teams.  And so on.
>
>Some things don't seem clear.  In particular, I'm not sure how 2&3 would
>not produce the same result.  If two teams are tied in points and in league
>wins, I think they'd have to have the same won-loss record vs HE teams.  Ed
>thinks there is a way they can produce different results but could not give
>me an example.
 
Only if the teams involved don't play the same number of league games... which
they all do, so that's a wash.
 
This sounds like a carry-over from Hockey East's shootout days, when it was
quite possible for teams to have the same number of points and league wins, but
to have different "won-loss" (i.e. ties are ignored) records against HE teams.
 In the shootout days, you could have two teams tied in the standings, one with
a 16-5-3 record and no shootout wins, the other with a 16-6-2 record and winning
both their shootouts.  Using HE's system of five points for a win, two points
for a tie, and an additional point for each shootout win, these two would be
tied in the standings with 86 points, tied in league wins with 16, and yet have
different win-loss records.  Presumably, 16-5 would beat out 16-6.
 
There is one other possibility, and it's really stupid and I hope HE doesn't do
this... but perhaps when they say "won-loss record vs HE teams" they mean in ALL
games, not just conference ones.  Thus, two HE teams could have the same number
of league wins, but one or the other or both could have faced HE opponents in
non-conference games, and thus they could have differing records "vs. HE teams."
It would be mighty dumb, IMHO, to use non-league results to break a tie in the
league standings, though.
 
>And if, say, there is a tie for 1st and for third, and the tie for 1st goes
>to the fourth tiebreaker, how do you decide which team to look at?  Not
>sure.
 
Assuming they couldn't break the third-place tie before the fourth tiebreaker,
my guess is that they would just combine the teams tied for third and use the
combined record against those teams in their "record vs. teams in descending
order" calculation.
 
Hockey East shows its Academic League background... they have a tiebreaker that
can produce an infinite loop, just like the ECAC does!  HE's seems a little
easier to resolve, however.
 
Question on the three-or-more tiebreaker... it says "Apply the two team
tiebreakers to all teams" and what I'm wondering is, do they keep going down the
tiebreaker list after teams get eliminated, or do they start over?  Here's an
example.  Suppose that in some year, BU, Lowell, and Providence all finish tied
in the standings with 30 points each.  Let's say Lowell has a 14-8-2 record and
BU and Providence both finish 13-7-4.  And suppose the head-to-head results
break down like this:
 
                     BU     Lowell   Prov.
 
BU (13-7-4)                  2-1     2-1     =   4-2
Lowell (14-8-2)      1-2             3-0     =   4-2
Prov. (13-7-4)       1-2     0-3             =   1-5
 
Obviously, Providence gets seeded lower than BU and Lowell based on head-to-head
record, but BU and Lowell are still tied.  Then what?  Do we move on to the next
tiebreaker and award the highest seed to Lowell based on league wins (14 to 13),
or do we start all over and give BU the highest seed based on their 2-1 record
against Lowell?  Under ECAC rules, we would start over, in order to avoid giving
Lowell a higher seed in a three-way tie than they would get had there been only
a tie between two teams.  In the above scenario, if the tie were only between BU
and Lowell, without Providence, BU would be the obvious higher seed.  I'm just
wondering how Hockey East would interpret this situation... or, for that matter,
how the CCHA and WCHA would handle a similar situation in their tiebreakers.
 
--
Disclaimer -- Unless otherwise noted, all opinions expressed above are
              strictly those of:
 
Bill Fenwick
Cornell '86 and '95
LET'S GO RED!!                                                  DJF  5/27/94
"So what's Cornell's strategy now -- go to the net?"
-- Grady Whittenberg, Cornell (WQNY) play-by-play announcer, following the
   clean-up efforts after Providence goalie Dan Dennis got sick on the ice
   during the first round of the Syracuse Invitational
 
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