Hockey: Standings turned into a guessing game

In a season as tight as this one has been in the eastern half of OUA men's hockey, no one should be left to guess that Ottawa has 26 points.

However, that's what you have to do as a fan... can you believe this? It's the second-last weekend of the season and there's an error in the standings on the CIS website.

The Gee-Gees are listed with a 12-11-2 record, but with 25 points, instead of the proper 26 that basic math tells you should have. As best anyone can tell, one of the Gee-Gees' three shootout victories was recorded as a tie when the standings were calculated.

It's not an excuse to point out that software the OUA and CIS are using might not have a way to record shootout results, since it's likely that they use the same program that was designed for use in the NCAA, which doesn't have the shootout. I'm not trying to make anyone look bad, but why wasn't this taken care of before the season? No could have foreseen such a tight race (six teams in the OUA East have between 22 and 27 points), but you have to be prepared.

Please click on the above link; it's an interesting debate within the NCAA about whether it should have shootouts in a such a compact schedule. I didn't even realize that U.S. college hockey still plays 5-on-5 regular-season overtime, whereas most Canadian leagues followed suit after the NHL adopted 4-on-4 in 1999.

Isn't that just like those Americans who want to change everything about hockey, believing that not only is there nothing wrong with a tie? Is there nothing they hold sacred? (Wink.)
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5 comments:

  1. Please tell me it doesn't shock you that CIS (or OUA) has a mistake (just one?) in the standings or stats.

    It's been absolutely bush league from the get-go this season.

    On one weekend alone, four media outlets/blogs had concerns about stats/standings (three hockey complaints, one basketball).

    You're right. A news software program should have been purchased at the beginning of the hockey season.

    It's inexcusable.

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  2. No, not shocked in the slightest, but it had to pointed out.

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  3. Yeah, no surprise here either: the OUA currently has three Queen's basketball players listed twice on the roster with different spellings of their names (Dan Banister, Alex Murphy, and Pat Beswick). There was one game this year where they had Banister listed three times on the stat sheet (as Dan Banister, Daniel Banister and Dan Bannister), and gave each one different stats. If they can't even get a name right (or notice that they mentioned the same guy three times!), what chance is there that they can count? This is also the organization that posted a completely inaccurate game summary of one of the football games this fall, causing significant problems with my article. I don't trust the OUA (and by extension, the CIS) one bit, but I'm forced to use their stats and recaps if I want to write about road games, which sometimes leads to errors. And they wonder why they don't get enough media coverage... I'm pretty sure most of the bigger media outlets would prefer to avoid getting egg on their faces from league embarrassments like these that seem to be far too common.

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  4. Not to mention last year when every Queen's-Ottawa game reported the Gaels' starting quarterback as "John Brannagan". Really, it's as easy to get these right as it is to get them wrong.

    Any chance you're following up on another terrific post on this topic, Neate? :P

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