05-20-2023, 10:09 PMluke Wrote:

Here I did the math. About 7200 games for each league. Basically, we have a lot less 1 goal games, a slightly more 4,5,6,7 goal differential games. I dont see the problem. NHL has more 1 goal games because you are playing in the real world. In FHM, its not the real world, its a simulation.


When you look at the SHL dataset



Which is 7,260 games, having those numbers is good! We are talking about 46% are two goal games, another 35% are 3/4 goal differential games(which lines up with the NHL at 33%). We just see more 5+ goal games(1304 of them) because you have 1600 TPE average teams going against 800 TPE average teams. Its a large spread of really good teams, and really bad teams

If you look at it from the other side, it's not that good really though. the NHL ratio would see only ~4 games per team (80 games) end at 5+ goal diff, we have avg of ~12 per team (240 games), which is a pretty significant chunk of the season when you consider that is the average. I understand the spread will be larger to some degree cause the way things are right now, but my whole feeling is that it's kind of a turn off to see teams getting slaughtered in a pretty significant chunk of games, and it's not just the TPE mismatch games either. NEW lost to PHI in a couple crazy games this season too 8-1 and then 9-6, which only shakes out at a 3 diff, but that wouldn't even look bad in this metric despite clearly being an insane scoreline.

If you want to attribute the weird results to TPE mismatches fine, it doesn't take long to find examples that disprove that being the sole reason, but fine. But if that is the case, why wouldn't we want to raise the replacement level players ability to compete so games are so stretched out to a completely unrealistic level? Losing is one thing, having be a complete slaughter is another.

And if you look deeper beyond just diff, why are some games ending at like 15+ goals in the first place? Where do we have the goal slider at where this is happening? I just think there are a lot of weird abnormalities in the results the sim has been spitting out in specific games that are either completely insane, or doesn't even feel close to realistic for the matchup, even if one team "had an off game" the scorelines are insane. If the league has no appetite to simulate a professional sports league, fine, but to me that was kind of the whole point.. and the engines we use are trying to do that as well, so it kind of makes sense we are getting wonky outcomes when we aren't using the engine close to how it was designed.