CarltonTheBear said:
That's not really my premise. I'll try to lay out my argument one final time here. You said that the Kings were a mediocre team that won the Stanley Cup because of Quick. I'll break that into 2 problems.
No, I didn't and the difference isn't just semantic. I said the Kings fit my description as a mediocre team who won "by virtue of" getting a run of "hot goaltending". That emphatically does not mean they won the Stanley cup because of Quick as a single solitary factor. It doesn't even mean it was the most important factor. It just means that, absent Quick getting hot, they almost certainly wouldn't have won. I don't think that's all that controversial, well, except apparently the "mediocre" part but we'll deal with that.
CarltonTheBear said:
First, the Kings weren't a mediocre team, even in the regular season. They finished with 100 points. They were a top-10 league in the team. They were the 4th best possession team, a statistic that better predicts future success than any other statistic out there, in the 10 years that Corsi can be accurately calculated in. They had the lowest goals against in the entire league. They had the 3rd best goals-differential in the entire league. Yes, they were one of the lowest scoring teams, but you can't just ignore all that other stuff because they couldn't score. You're making it seem like they didn't deserve to be in the playoffs. They had an 11-point advantage on the 9th place team, they didn't sneak in.
I'm not ignoring "all that other stuff". I'm factoring it in. They were one of the worst offenses in the league. They had the 27th best PP, the 11th best PK. Rather than say "top 10" which I know is a rhetorical trick you could just say 9th. They finished with the 9th most points in the league by virtue of getting a good number of loser points. They were in a three way tie for 11th in the league for ROW, with Tampa Bay and Columbus. They couldn't score, they got below average goaltending. You're asking to ignore that, all of that data that at best paints them as ok, on the basis of possession numbers and goals against.
But at the end of the day none of that matters because, again remember that what this argument is is my contention that, post lockout,
every team is mediocre. The ones at the top of the standings too. So arguing about where they rank among mediocre teams doesn't actually test that notion. That, I think you'd agree, by all conventional metrics they were deeply unexceptional last year I think you'd have to agree that, again given the idea that all teams are mediocre, that they'd qualify. I consider the teams last year that finished just shy of 120 points to be mediocre.
I've used this analogy before but if you took all the teams in this year's March Madness and divided the talent evenly then two things would remain indisputably true:
1. Various Teams would still finish 1st in defense, 1st in offense, etc
2. A Team would win the tournament
Despite those things being true, though, none of the teams would be good. Even if a team finished, in that evenly divided tournament, 1st in Offense and 1st in Defense they wouldn't be as good of a Basketball team as the Kentucky Wildcats.
CarltonTheBear said:
Next, Quick. Yeah he was good for them in the playoffs. But he wasn't great. And he didn't need to be because LA scored at an elite rate due to a very high shooting percentage. If you think that Quick was the driving factor behind LA's Cup win then you're saying that his stats were more impressive than LA's scoring. I made up a chart showing the Stanley Cup finalists in the past 7 years and included their goalies save percentage and their goals per game. I added Quick's "adjusted" save percentage too, even though nobody else had the opportunity to ignore their first 3 games if they weren't flattering to them. Quick's ".920" really isn't all that special in that light.
Well that's just silly. My comment is their a "run" of hot goaltending. If a player went pointless for 7 games and then scored 20 points over his next seven would you say that you couldn't comment on how hot he'd been for those seven games without taking into account the previous seven games? By its definition a run is meant to divide time between when something was happening and when it wasn't. I'm not arbitrarily slicing out his three worst games. I'm saying his hot streak had a beginning date. That Quick was not as good before he got hot
is the entire point.
And again, with regards to your chart, you're establishing my point. All of the teams on your list won a lot of the playoffs and, I think you'd agree, there are some pretty g-d unimpressive goalies and unimpressive teams on that list. But what happened? Their goalies got hot, and a .920 save percentage is good goaltending no matter how you slice it, and they won. That Quick got, comparatively, less hot than some others doesn't make that untrue.
