Today I'm going to take a look at the scoring data from the first three seasons of my Strat-O-Matic historical hockey league.
The short answer is: No. It's just dumb luck. We are, after all, dealing with extremely small sample sizes (twelve-game seasons).
In Strat-O-Matic, as in real life, goaltenders are the players who have the largest overall impact on the outcome of a game. Likewise, both in the game and in real life, their results are highly volatile (i.e., luck plays a major role). For example, it takes about 3,000(!) shots for a professional goaltender's save percentage to stabilize to the point where we can start to see his true talent emerge from the noise of random chance.
So the story of Season 2, then, is that goalies were unlucky? That's part of it. But it takes two to tango, and skating players were the ones scoring all those goals. However, the jump in scoring came not from all players, but really only from two players: Frank McGee had 18 goals and Cyclone Taylor had 16. If we give them the average of their Season 1 and 3 totals instead of what they actually scored in Season 2, then the league total for Season 2 drops to within a couple of goals of 1 and 3. I think the best explanation for Season 2, then, is that two guys got lucky and ran the table!
- Season 1: 136 total goals scored (2.83 goals per team per game)
- Season 2: 157 total goals scored (3.27 goals per team per game)
- Season 3: 139 total goals scored (2.89 goals per team per game)
The short answer is: No. It's just dumb luck. We are, after all, dealing with extremely small sample sizes (twelve-game seasons).
In Strat-O-Matic, as in real life, goaltenders are the players who have the largest overall impact on the outcome of a game. Likewise, both in the game and in real life, their results are highly volatile (i.e., luck plays a major role). For example, it takes about 3,000(!) shots for a professional goaltender's save percentage to stabilize to the point where we can start to see his true talent emerge from the noise of random chance.
So the story of Season 2, then, is that goalies were unlucky? That's part of it. But it takes two to tango, and skating players were the ones scoring all those goals. However, the jump in scoring came not from all players, but really only from two players: Frank McGee had 18 goals and Cyclone Taylor had 16. If we give them the average of their Season 1 and 3 totals instead of what they actually scored in Season 2, then the league total for Season 2 drops to within a couple of goals of 1 and 3. I think the best explanation for Season 2, then, is that two guys got lucky and ran the table!
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