Please visit Puckerings for more hockey stuff by me   

Earlier this season, Senators captain Daniel Alfredsson publicly guaranteed that his team would win the Stanley Cup in 2004. He should know better.

Here’s something that informed outsiders have come to realize about playoffs, in any sport: they’re a crapshoot. By that, I don’t mean playoffs are completely random. Rather, I mean that playoff series are short enough that ‘upsets’ are common.

If you take 30 teams of varying strengths and put them in a tournament where each team plays 82 games against a variety of the other teams (including at least one game against each), the final results will give you quite a good idea of the actual strength of each team.

If you take two teams of different strengths and put them in a tournament where they play each other between four and seven times, the final results will tell you almost nothing about the actual strength of each team.

Even if the best team played against the worst team, the worst team would win a series now and then. It may only be 2% of the time, but the chance is there. And when that 1-in-50 chance occurs, it’s not because the best team choked, or that the worst team ‘knew what it took’ to win, it’s because of random chance. Seven games is not enough to determine the relative quality of NHL teams, much less four games. So the playoffs are largely a crapshoot.

This doesn’t mean the Senators won’t win, of course. The most common regular-season rank of Stanley Cup winners is first place. So teams often do overcome the randomness of the playoffs to show their true quality. But Alfredsson should be saying something more like, ‘there’s about a 50% chance we’ll win the Cup this year, I think’, rather than his unsupportable assertion. Of course, many people don’t really understand what that means (how can it be 50%, you either win or you don’t!), so you really can’t blame him.

Nor can you blame the Senators of seasons past for ‘choking’ in the playoffs. It wasn’t them. It was the system.