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***Whitecap*** · 01-19-2025, 04:25 PM

When the schedule comes out at the beginning of each season, one thing that gets talked about occasionally is When the schedule comes out at the beginning of each season, one thing that gets talked about occasionally is the number of back-to-back games (B2Bs) each team must play that season. That is when a team is scheduled to play a game two days in a row. There are many downsides to an increased amount of these games, namely concerns surrounding the stamina of your players and your goalies. Most teams will try and avoid having their starter play both of these back to backs, but the same cannot be done for the skaters. This has led me to wonder how much teams are affected by these games, especially because FHM does not really care for fairness when it makes the schedules, and some teams are stuck with more B2B games than others. So, I decided to do some analysis by compiling the data on each team’s performance in B2B games over the past season to see how much of a detriment it is, and whether some teams tend to perform better in them than others. In collecting this data, I only took into account the second leg of the B2B games, as I figured the players would still be rested in the first game, while that would not be the case in the second.

Before I present my findings, I should mention a few caveats. I initially was going to see how goalies performed in instances where they played both games, but eventually decided against it. This was because most of the time teams avoided doing this, leaving very few data points to base any conclusions off of. I also realized it would take a lot more time and I already put more time into this than I had expected to. This means that there is a good chance that teams are more likely to play their back up goalies in such games when compared to non-B2Bs, and I don’t know how this may affect the data. I also did not take into account how many games teams played around these B2B games. Sometimes these games came after a stretch of days off for the team, meaning the team might have been more well rested for the set of games. Other times, there were many B2Bs played within the same stretch, leading to potentially poorer results. For example, I noticed with Texas that they played a very average amount of B2B games this season (19), but a whopping 7 of those came in the month of October alone. This means that maybe the team was more tired around games and potentially saw worse results because of this. That said, I assume this probably averages out somewhat. I also did not look at how many of these games were home or away games or how that affected things. Lastly, I did not look at overtime or shootout wins or losses, I purely just looked at each team’s number of total wins and losses. With that out of the way, let’s look at the numbers!

Number of B2Bs

The first question on my mind was, how many of these games did each team have to play this season? Turns out the answer is: a lot. Teams played an average of 19 (!) back-to-back games this season. It seemed like a lot, but I wasn’t entirely sure so I compared it to the NHL (some fake fantasy league in case you haven’t heard of it). There, teams were scheduled an average of just under 12 sets of B2Bs this season, despite playing 82 games compared to our 66. This raises another question of why are there so many? Is it because FHM hates us? Is it because HO wants to punish us? We may never know. A few teams were “lucky” enough to only play 17, whereas Montreal, NOLA, and Toronto were the unlucky ones to have to play 22.

Performance in B2Bs

So, we’ve seen how many B2Bs each team had to play this season, so how did these teams fare? Honestly, not too poorly.

As you can see, teams had wildly varying win percentages in B2Bs, with some teams being far more successful in them than others. Namely, San Francisco going 17-3 was a stat that jumped out to me. Interestingly, one of their three losses was a 7-1 defeat. Atlanta also did quite well in them, going 13-4, including an 11-3 victory early on in the season. On the other side of the table, we can see Minnesota winning only 2 of their 17 B2B games, for a win percentage of 11.8%. It actually took them 13 attempts for them to win the second leg of a B2B, after beating Chicago 5-2. Their second win came against LA in the final game of the season. Something you might have also noticed in the data, is that teams really performed quite well in these matches. Putting the wins and losses together, we actually get 194 wins and 187 losses for an overall win percentage of 50.92%. That’s right, teams actually won more games on the back half of a B2B than they lost, which is not something I expected.

It probably isn’t wildly surprising that the two best teams in the league this season were also the best at winning their B2Bs. Which made me wonder which teams actually performed the best relative to their non-B2B games.

B2B vs. Non-B2B Performance

For this data set, all I did was I calculated the win percentage of each team on the second leg of their B2Bs and compared it to their win percentage in all other games (with the second part of B2Bs removed). To clarify, the percentage you’ll see in this chart will be B2B win% minus non-B2B win %. Even more simply, a higher number means the team did better in their B2B games, and a lower number means a team performed better in their non-B2B games. Make sense? No? Okay you’re getting the data anyway.

Okay so it looks like San Francisco does really just perform very well in their B2Bs. Their 17-3 (85.00 W%) B2B record compares to a record of 29-17 (63.04 W%) in non-B2B games, for a difference of 21.96%. Something we did not see in the previous numbers was how well Chicago actually performed in these games. Although they did lose more than they won, with a B2B record of 10-11 (47.62 W%), their non-B2B record was only 13-32 (28.89 W%).

On the other side we do still have Minnesota near the bottom, as their 2-15 (11.76 W5) B2B record compared very poorly to their 17-32 (34.69 W%) in their other games. The only team that performed worse in these games relative to the rest of their schedule was Buffalo, going 7-10 (41.18 W%) in B2Bs and 33-16 (67.35 W%) in their other games.

Conclusions

For the sake of interest, I’ll dump the rest of the data I collected here as well. Once again, the data in this table is simply the difference in each of these stats in B2B games compared to non-B2B games.

The goal totals, both for and against, didn’t really change a lot in these games. Teams seemed to allow, on average, one more shot in B2Bs games. Ultimately, it didn’t seem like these games looked at that different when compared to the rest of the games in the schedule, which is something that surprised me. Perhaps it means that these games are not as detrimental to a team’s success as one may think, but maybe it could be explained by other factors.

This data does raise some more questions for me. Although, on average, there was not much difference in these games, team’s success in them did fluctuate pretty wildly. Teams like San Francisco and Chicago seemed to thrive on the back of B2Bs, whereas Buffalo and Minnesota seemed to struggle a lot more. I briefly looked at each team’s stamina ratings and I did notice that SFP leads the league by a lot in their average stamina, though I’m not sure this trend held up with the rest of the league. It could have something to do with how well each team’s backup goalies played this season, as they probably got more ice time in these games. I’m also curious as to how this data would compare to that of other seasons, maybe this season is an outlier, or it could have been different in other versions of FHM. Overall, I’m really not sure what this all tells us, but I found it very interesting nonetheless, and I hope you do too!

***luke*** · 01-19-2025, 05:20 PM

super interesting stuff Whitecap! love the analysis of it. It could definitely be stamina related. You could always look at SFP and be like "well they are a good team of course they win". For the most part thats right, however some cases its not.

In FHM itself there is a tab that shows the team's averages in each stat. I wonder if you one can take a look at that and see which teams favor what.

**Lime** · 01-19-2025, 05:53 PM

BUF getting hammered you hate to see it

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