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Pythagoras and the National Hockey League
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James J Cochran
and Rob Blackstock
Published/Copyright:
May 1, 2009
The nature of the relationship Bill James found between the win/loss percentage of a Major League Baseball team and the number of runs the team scores and allows over the course of a season is investigated for the National Hockey League (NHL). We find the optimal form of James' model for the NHL using the absolute error criterion and demonstrate that far more complex forms of James' model yield little in additional predictive power. We also provide empirical evidence that the relationship between win/loss percentage and goals scored and allowed varies relatively little across recent seasons.
Keywords: sports; operations research; mathematical programming; optimization; Pythagorean Method; hockey
Published Online: 2009-5-1
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Keywords for this article
sports;
operations research;
mathematical programming;
optimization;
Pythagorean Method;
hockey
Articles in the same Issue
- Conference Paper
- A Statistical Analysis of NFL Quarterback Rating Variables
- Optimizing Football Game Play Calling
- Assessing Methods for College Football Rankings
- Chasing DiMaggio: Streaks in Simulated Seasons Using Non-Constant At-Bats
- Modeling Baseball Player Ability with a Nested Dirichlet Distribution
- `If the Team Doesn't Win, Nobody Wins:' A Team-Level Analysis of Pay and Performance Relationships in Major League Baseball
- Keeping the Hitter Off Balance: Mixed Strategies in Baseball
- Using Simulation to Estimate the Impact of Baserunning Ability in Baseball
- A New Handicapping System for Golf
- Scramble Teams for the Pinehurst Terrapin Classic
- Pythagoras and the National Hockey League