> Heal Point System Rank for Men's ECAC D-I College Hockey, through 2000-02-12. I assume that Wayne is calculating this as a way to correct for the different in the number of games played by ECAC teams this season, and the unbalanced nature of the schedule. However, HEAL seems like a strange choice of rating system for this job, for the following reason: If a group of teams play a balanced schedule, each team playing each other team an equal number of times, I think we'd all agree that the correct way to rank the teams based on those results is by their overall won-lost-tied record. (Whether you refer to total points or winning percentage, the results are the same, since winning percentage is just points divided by twice the number of games played.) KRACH (as one of the defining properties of the system) and RPI (because all teams' "Opponents' Winning Percentage" are equal after a balanced schedule) are both guaranteed to give the same ranking as won-lost-tied record if the schedule is balanced. HEAL lacks this very desirable property, since wins over good and bad teams are rated differently, while losses to any team are rated the same. So if HEAL ratings were calculated for last season's ECAC race, or this season's Hockey East race, which both used a balanced schedule, there's no guarantee that the results would reproduce the final standings. To give an example of how this can happen, imagine a league with four teams, A, B, C and D, who each play each other once each, with the following results: head2head ____HEAL____ A B C D W-L-T Pts P.I. T.I. Pct RPI KRACH A W W T 2-0-1 5 33.33 133.33 .833 .617 350.2 B L W T 1-1-1 3 20.00 66.67 .500 .500 100.0 C L L W 1-2-0 2 13.33 44.44 .333 .442 56.51 D T T L 0-1-2 2 13.33 88.89 .333 .442 56.51 The teams have played a balanced schedule, so there is nothing to correct for, but while team D's won-lost-tied record of 0-1-2 is worse than team B's record of 1-1-1, they have the higher HEAL rating (Tournament Index). As shown above, both RPI and KRACH give the same rankings as winning percentage for this balanced schedule. Incidentally (and I've actually had this going since long before the whole UVM business, to get a snapshot of teams' performances given the unbalanced nature of their partial schedules while the season was in progress) I've got an intraconference KRACH rating for the ECAC on the web at http://www.slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?ecac.rrwp John Whelan, Cornell '91 [log in to unmask] http://www.amurgsval.org/joe/ It's playoff possibilities time! http://www.slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?ecac.cgi HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey; send information to [log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.