2012-13 Week #2 Rankings Released

Week #2 rankings have been released. A number of teams had a good week and are eagerly anticipating the new rankings. Before you go there, I need to prepare you for what you are about to see. Warning, it won't be pretty.

Last week saw only a very limited number of teams that qualified for the rankings by meeting the five game minimum. This week, almost twice as many teams have qualified for the rankings. That means, virtually every team has moved down in the rankings, no matter how good of a week they might have had. But here it is important to say that you are not so much moving down as the rankings are filling in with new teams every week.

So instead of looking at your team's ranking, I'm going to encourage you to look at the rankings in a new way going forward. MYHockey publishes the math behind the rankings. So, if you want to know if last week was a good week for your team, look at the math and it'll tell you what you need to know. I have randomly selected the LA Jr Kings 16U AAA team as an example. They come in this week at #5 in the USA Midget 16U Tier 1 Rankings. The Jr Kings played four league games this past weekend. I can tell this by clicking on green icon in the details column to the far right of the team's name and numbers on the rankings page. It says they beat the Ohio Blue Jackets 4-1, beat the TPH Thunder 3-2 in OT, beat the Buffalo Jr Sabres 6-2 and lost the Pittsburgh Penguins Elite 5-3. In a tough league, going 3-1 on the weekend looks like a pretty good weekend, right? Now, let's look at the math. On the LA Jr Kings MYHockey Team Page, click on the details icon located just to the right of the Rating (above the scores). This link takes us to the "math page". On this page I get a breakdown of every result and it's contribution to the team's rating. Let's look at one example, the Ohio Blue Jackets game. I see the score was 4-1, giving the Jr Kings a GD or goal differential of +3. The Blue Jackets have a rating of 90.79 and the Jr Kings had a +3 goal differential on the game. We add these together giving the Jr Kings a total of 93.79 points for the game, or 0.19 points better than the expected result - their rating average of 93.60 points. We can do the same analysis on the other three games they played this past weekend. While going 3-1, the Jr Kings actually end up coming in 0.09 points less than expected on their weekend of play, mostly as a result of the Pittsburgh Penguins game. Note that in this example all the wins resulted in positive points for the Jr Kings and all the lose resulted in negative points, but that is not always the case.

So, instead of watching your ranking slip each week because more and more teams qualify for the rankings, I encourage you to look at the mathematics behind the rankings to more accurately see how you might assess your most recent games.

Now, on to this week's rankings.
More articles like this...
Other articles of this type...