What is Sports Club Stats?
I calculate your team's odds of making the playoffs and how upcoming games will impact those odds, so you can see at a glance which of today's games matter most. Every team, division, conference and league has its own page in the tabs above.
How do I know?
Every night I run a computer simulation that randomly plays the season's remaining games millions of times and tallies up how many times each team finishes at each seed.
For example, awhile back this is how the tally progressed for the NHL Eastern Conference. The Conference has 15 teams, 8 of which make the playoffs. The 3 division winners get the top 3 seeds.
| ********* | ********* | ********* | ********* | ********* | ********* | ********* | ********* | ********* | ********* | ********* | ********* | ********* | ********* | ********* | |||||||
| Number of times teams finish at each position after 1 simulation run. | |||||||||||||||||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | |||||||
| Sabres | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Devils | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Senators | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Penguins | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Thrashers | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Lightning | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Islanders | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Maple Leafs | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Hurricanes | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Rangers | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Canadiens | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Bruins | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Panthers | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Capitals | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Flyers | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Simulate season: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 10 | 100 | 1,000 | 10,000 | 100,000 | 1,000,000 | 10,000,000 | times. | |
| Show: | total | average | ||||||||||||
There are an infinite number of ways the season could play out, but by randomly picking a bunch we get a good approximation. This way of estimating is called the Monte Carlo method.
3 Big Caveats
1. My assumption that each team has the same probabilities of winning a game, with no regard for record, injuries, matchups, or streaks.
2. "Out" does not necessarily mean mathematically eliminated. It just means in the millions of times I played out the season that team never made the playoffs. Likewise for "In".
3. My tiebreaking logic could still have bugs. I've found and fixed a bunch already ( when the 06 NFL regular season ended I showed Green Bay making the playoffs, and when the 07 MLB regular season ended I showed the Rockies not making the playoffs) but I bet some still remain.
How do I know the impact of upcoming games?
First I get a baseline by running the simulation with the current standings. Then, for each upcoming game I:- Pretend the home team wins 1-0 and run the simulation on the remaining games.
- Pretend the away team wins 1-0 and run the simulation on the remaining games.
- For football (soccer), pretend the teams draw 0-0 and run the simulation on the remaining games.
- For hockey, pretend each team loses in overtime 0-1 and run the simulation on the remaining games.
- Compare each team's new pretend chance of making the playoffs with the actual baseline chance to see how much it goes up or down.