Are playoffs a crapshoot or is calling them a crapshoot a load of crap?

Problem with that thread title is that it's not a binary. It's a question of how "crapshooty" are the playoffs? Here's a pretty good reference that looks at the question across multiple leagues.

http://harvardsportsanalysis.org/?p=4478

Of NBA, NHL, NFL, and MLB, they found NBA to be the least crapshooty (for reasons I have listed in previous threads - one being prolificity of scoring). MLB was the most crapshooty. Not sure where MLS would fit in, but I think the early rounds (2-game home/home series), combined with the scarcity of scoring in soccer, make them pretty crapshooty. The later rounds, the higher seed has home field, which is a strong advantage.

 

Shoot, I really don't give a crap.

 

All I know about knockout tournaments is that in a home and home series, the higher seeds rarely are upset. Just look at the CL which is basically playoff in the knockout rounds. The top teams find a way to get to the final. Just look at Barcelona's previous dominance and now Bayern's. Will they win every year? Nope. But they will ALWAYS be in contention until the very end.

 

Could be true in CL, where there is less parity. In MLS, where there is a lot of parity, I would bet that upsets are fairly common in the home/home series. Quakes went out 1st round in both of the years they won SS. KC has had similar issues (until last year).

 

Less parity? Man City, PSG, Chelsea,Dortmund, Atletico and Man Utd are not in the same league? The next tier is Barcelona, Madrid and Bayern, basically the equivalent of NY, LA and SEA in terms of spending in terms of performance LA, RSL and SKC could be that tier. You pick. Either way, you cannot have it both ways where LA, SEA, NY and now TOR spend way more than the rest of the league and then scream parity to win this argument. Madrid hasn't won the CL in years and they are still a perennial contender.

 

We went through the playoff stats in another thread (which JazzyJ dismissed as mere data) and those suggested the "best" regular season team by record in MLS fares better in playoffs than in NFL, NHL or MLB (despite those other leagues having higher scoring and playoff rounds with more games). There are plenty of problems with that comparison but at minimum it suggests MLS playoffs are NOT a crapshoot (at least not more so than other sports) though obviously as with everything in the world there are random influences and factors. And of course with parity, unbalanced schedules and close regular season point totals, it is not exactly easy to establish the "best" regular season team in the first place -- total points is a major part of it but not the only consideration. We only need to look back as far as 2013, where only one point separated NYRB and SKC from the Supporters' Shield. Was NYRB really the better regular season team in all but points? Same thing in the Western Conference ... was Portland the best team because it had one more point than RSL? I think we could go through a bunch of MLS seasons and make subjective arguments that the "best team" made it to the final, and often won. All we'd have to agree on is that regular season record alone does not determine "best".

 

There are numerous references that document the relative "craphootiness" of playoffs in various sports. I don't think I'm the one who is "dismissing data". One issue is what does "best" actually mean? Is it the best over some period of time, or is it a "point measurement", i.e. who is the best at the end of the season - that point in time. If it's the latter, then it would be easier to dismiss the regular season other than to weed out poor performers.

But the problem with a point measurement is that you can't get enough data to make it anything close to a statistically significant measurement. This is not an opinion. These are the laws of nature. For example, a team that is say 20% better than the other (say a .6 and a .4) would have a 60% chance of winning a one-game series, but about a 65% chance of winning a 3-game series, and so one. That's just the way the combinatorial math works out. If you had a 99 game series, then you'd probably be in the 90-something-percentile in correctly measuring the better team to be the winner.

Now in practice it would be rare to find teams that are 20% better than another team. In MLS western conference, there was about 10% difference in points from the lowest to highest seed. Of course we are going back to regular season results to get that, but that's all we have available, so it is a proxy to what we'd really want to measure. But the point is that even if we throw away the notion of regular season defining "best team", we can't do a very good job of determining "best team" in a very short series, like 2 games. Again, not an opinion; laws of nature.

 

The regular season is a pretty good indicator of who is going to contend, in some cases you can see who is going to win.

Just look the past finals. How many times have the Galaxy been in them? Many years they've been top tier. On some they just ran hot at the right time. History shows that teams like LA, HOU, RSL, DC, and NE have known what it takes to play the big games when the chips are down. Track the champions position during the regular season and you see it isn't always a Cinderella Story. In all sports the Cinderella team rarely win it all. It is not a crap shoot when the playoffs consistently see the many of the same sides make runs to contend.

 

There is a difference between predicting and reflecting. I wholeheartedly agree with the factors you have mentioned as making it difficult to handicap playoff results using statistics. I have never claimed that the best team is the one with the best regular season record ... only that as a metric, best regular season record clearly has an influence, and therefore "crapshoot" is not an entirely accurate term. If you said "a bit of a crapshoot" as Bochy did in the quote you referenced previously, or even that "playoffs can often be a crapshoot", then I don't think you'd be getting a lot of arguments to the contrary. But you have used "crapshoot" as a term to indicate that anything goes in the playoffs and that buy extension there isn't much that a team can do to win a championship. So might as well just get in the playoffs any which way but loose, and then roll the dice.

 

Again, as I mentioned in the first post of this thread, it's not a binary - crapshoot or not crapshoot. That goes w/o saying. So it's just a question of how much of a crapshoot it is.

I think where it gets interesting is that if we consider that there is some aspect of "getting hot" in the playoffs, and you can't make yourself get hot (and in fact trying to do so might have the opposite effect), is there anything you can do to maybe insulate yourself from the whole hot/cold equation? In baseball, maybe it's speed. Speed doesn't really get hot or cold. You either have it or you don't. Or maybe it's power pitching. Finesse pitching is probably more subject to hot and cold than straight-up power pitching. There may be analogous things in soccer as well.

 

In my mind "crapshoot" means that you can't really control it. You can't "make" your team get hot in the playoffs any more than you can cause a ball to brush your player's hand. Those are all reasons that Billy Beane says that he can't affect what happens in the playoffs. Although mostly right, I think there are some things that you might be able to do to give your team a better chance, other than just building as good a team as you possibly can, as I mentioned in my last post. I wouldn't be surprised if he isn't sandbagging it a bit and working on some of those things.

 

The narrow field/watering the field thing might fall into the realm of things you can do to give your team an advantage. The Quakes home record over the last couple of seasons suggests that there is something beyond the team itself that is contributing to positive results. How effective those measures are and what they are exactly would probably vary from team to team.

A similar example to that would be back when I was playing in high school, we had an incredibly hard field with very dry grass. Because of that we played a very fast game that took advantage of incredibly speedy forwards who could shoot off of high bouncing balls. We outscored our opponents at home something like 5 to 1. I don't know how much of it was the players adapting to the field and how much it was the players having a natural ability to play that kind of game, but I think the particulars of a home field can play a major part in a team's success. The rules for field conditions of professional matches I would think would be more rigid than a high school conference, but trying to turn the odds in your favor is certainly worth exploring.

To give another example is the A's, where the theory is that they have tried to take advantage of their large field and the trend of ground ball pitchers by acquiring fly ball hitters so that they get more line drives and thus more extra base hits. Unlike my anecdote, there is some statistical work that strongly suggests this method was being used and that it had a positive effects on the A's results.

The thing about using your home field specifically to aid you means that the advantage is probably lost during away games. Considering that half of a team's games are going to be at home, though, it seems likely that it would be worth building a team to take advantage of an environment you can control and then hope that your players will still be good and consistent enough to get decent results away.

 

OK, so then we have 1st level crapshoot (who is hot and who is not), and then 2nd level crapshoot (within the context of who's hot and who is not, what are the random events that occur). It's crap within crap!

 

Crapshooty??

 

BS: Ever reinventing the language of soccer.

 

Having an equal home field advantage does not also magically create equal teams. Bad teams at home have a slightly higher chance of winning, maybe, but they still would have the probability of losing against teams that are better. Then, of course, there are the teams that get home field advantage all wrong and end up decreasing their chances of winning.

 

In soccer: One, a defense that is not error prone and can't be easily exploited (set pieces, counters). Two, using tactics that can be easily modified (i.e., not a flat 4-4-2) and properly training the players to make tactical changes during the game as needed. Three, balancing the skill set (don't need 4 tall, slow target forwards). Four, skill over brawn. Five, your attack should keep the opponent on the back foot and guessing. Six, quality bench depth at critical positions (CB, CM). Seven, spend the most money on your midfield, not your defenders or strikers. Eight, give playing time to youngsters with high ceilings (always have at least 3 such players on the roster). Nine, put money and effort into scouting and development. Ten, acquire proven talent with the realization that you'll have to pay fair value.

 

Let's put it this way: The winner of the Supporters' Shield have won the MLS Cup in six of the 18 years of MLS' existance (i.e. 33.33%). That -- to me -- is a lot better odds than a crapshoot!

 

Of course when we say "crapshoot" it's not literally a 50/50 crapshoot. It's a question of how much, not a binary. You are better off being good than not, of course, and the system is weighed to favor the higher seeds (home field in some rounds, start against low seeds initially, etc.). Given the built-in advantages I would expect it to be higher than the flat crapshoot rate (12.5%). But high seeds are still pretty susceptible to going out in the early home / home rounds due to tiny sample size.

The Quakes two Supporter's Shield winning teams went out in the first round, if you recall :--).

 

I already made that point in another thread devoted to the crapshootiness of playoffs. Someone pointed out many of those doubles occurred early on when the league had just a few teams. And it has also been pointed out that constant changes in regular season, playoff and Cup formats will have impacted the comparability of the results. Still, there were double winners (MLS Cup and SS) as recently as 2008 and 2011. We can make good arguments for MLS Cup winners deserving the title in the other years as well. Perhaps the lone crapshoot Cup winner is the Rapids of 2010. That's 1 "crapshoot" out of 18? Maybe 2 if I missed another one that didn't deserve it?