Hey Clownlover, the sky isn't falling: this year's team is last year's team.

[Trotsky]

one of the big appeals of cornell hockey to fans, players, and coaches is the positive energy and atmosphere of lynah.  i hope that recruits aren't here on elynah, thinking that the mix of commentary is reflective of the actual support that the entire community provides.

This could be a concern.  I very much doubt players and prospects know or care the slightest about sites like this, but we are certainly not helping anybody by cosplaying Stephen A. Smith.

This is not FBI overreach and we are not Edward R. Murrow.  I'll admit I have never understood the mindset of "I paid for my ticket I have a right to boo!" and that it is at least theoretically conceivable people like that are not the spoiled brats they appear to be, but even if it isn't prima facie infantile, it does leave a bad taste in the universe. In my opinion.

[abmarks]

Clownlover-

When you compare results this year vs last for Cornell, Clarkson and Princeton, you're conclusions are completely off-base. You can't compare each of the three schools relative results because they aren't at all correlated.

Princeton improved a lot so far this year.  I don't study their program to know how much personnel  or injuries are impacting things.  The easiest conclusion is that to her most likely result would be to improve, given they've been bad for a long time.  But even if it was solely do to coaching, the only conclusion would be that syer was better than his predecessor. It's not like we can give Mike, casey and Ben each a full year replay of the exact same season with the Princeton lineup to run an absolute comparison.

When you look at Clarkson, again without staring at the lineup, there are two significant explanations. The same argument may hold as at Princeton: while we don't know yet in the long term how it translates to the college game, Clarkson's new HC quite likely a big reason for improvement. I can't say if he's a better or worse coach than Casey, but his pedigree is by far more high powered. That pedigree can be a big motivator and source of jump for the players in the short term, whether or not he's a better coach.  Assessing him as an overall coach is going  ability itself has got to be evaluated in the longer term especially with the importance of recruiting which you can't fairly judge in year one.

Now for Ben and Casey and Mike's impact and capability as pure hockey coaches, it's again idiotic to try and draw comparisons the way you are.   Your so called burning questions are hardly burning questions and for some of them you seem unaware that there's information out there already.

Someone linked to Jane McNally's recent sun article, and she asked coach about how things were going with Casey.  You clearly didn't read that article.  I know that because coach talks about how he basically dumped all the recruiting and administrative stuff on Casey and he's having a lot more fun this year because he can put almost all his time and energy into actually coaching for the first time in a very very long time.

So by the Clownlover coaching assessment test (ccat) the answer would be that syer is a better coach than Mike.   Why?

Changes in coaching responsibilities (on ice, do stuff, not recruiting and admin);

Syer departs and his responsibilities need to be picked up by someone.  I've got no idea what the full breadth of his responsibilities were. But it's a silly assumption to assume that Casey has just been plugged in to covering exactly what Syer did. Apart from different strengths and weaknesses between those two guys, Casey wouldn't have the bandwidth because, per the sun article, he's already taken over a number of mike's off-ice responsibilities. Mike says he's only having to coach now, so Mike may well be doing some of the coaching that syer has handled.

On top of that, there is something to be said for continuity. I'd think a bump in the road is more likely than not this year, regardless of who came in once after syer left, solely from breaking up a long running well oiled machine.  Change is seldom seamless.  Syer already knew the players. Casey has to get to know them and what each guy needs etc.


And the last point has to do with expectations.   When I started the thread pointing out how this year's team was last years team, you missed the main thrust of my point.  The point was that last year we substantially surpassed expectations and probably were just plain lucky and ran well above reasonable expectations in the second half In that we won more than any expected wins star would have measured and if you ran that second half back ten times I don't think we get that many wins the other 9 times.

Then coming into this season, people set expectations, unrealistically, because of the recency bias of that crazy second half run.  There's no margin of error there to be able meet or exceed that inflated expectation, especially if we actually over achieved somewhat last year.

It's fair to say that we are underperforming against a reasonable expectation, sure.  But you are in a binary view.

Lastly, re caatagna and others, we know nothing about the whys of their performance.   Caatagna is probably playing hurt-in more than one game he went down the tunnel for a while iirc during a game, wasn't it his shoulder one time?

I.wouldnt be surprised if a LOT of guys are knocked up far more than we know.

[BearLover]

I ain't reading all that

[marty]

I ain't reading all that

And when many of us see your repetitive posts....

By the way BL, what's the question of the day hour nano-secind?

[ugarte]

one of the big appeals of cornell hockey to fans, players, and coaches is the positive energy and atmosphere of lynah.  i hope that recruits aren't here on elynah, thinking that the mix of commentary is reflective of the actual support that the entire community provides.

This could be a concern.  I very much doubt players and prospects know or care the slightest about sites like this, but we are certainly not helping anybody by cosplaying Stephen A. Smith.

You think this place is more hostile than college sports forums in general?

[scoop85]

I.wouldnt be surprised if a LOT of guys are knocked up far more than we know.

So we may have several pregnant players. That would explain the underperformance.

[chimpfood]

You definitely want to listen to this week's podcast when it's out

Kind of off topic for this thread but I had a question about the podcast. Toward the end Adam inferred that because hockey east is so high in the pairwise and pretty much only has league play to go, they will essentially beat each other up in the pairwise. But, since the conference has so many teams in the top 20 and non con play is basically done, shouldn't they only help each other? Every league game that they play from now on is essentially just the hockey east giving themselves quality win bonuses due to their high pairwise standing which only helps the league get even better in the pairwise, not worse. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but the league should only get better in the pairwise, not worse as conference play happens through the rest of the year, right?

[adamw]

You definitely want to listen to this week's podcast when it's out

Kind of off topic for this thread but I had a question about the podcast. Toward the end Adam inferred that because hockey east is so high in the pairwise and pretty much only has league play to go, they will essentially beat each other up in the pairwise. But, since the conference has so many teams in the top 20 and non con play is basically done, shouldn't they only help each other? Every league game that they play from now on is essentially just the hockey east giving themselves quality win bonuses due to their high pairwise standing which only helps the league get even better in the pairwise, not worse. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but the league should only get better in the pairwise, not worse as conference play happens through the rest of the year, right?

Someone has to lose every game. OOC peak record can be 1.000. League games peak record is .500.

[chimpfood]

You definitely want to listen to this week's podcast when it's out

Kind of off topic for this thread but I had a question about the podcast. Toward the end Adam inferred that because hockey east is so high in the pairwise and pretty much only has league play to go, they will essentially beat each other up in the pairwise. But, since the conference has so many teams in the top 20 and non con play is basically done, shouldn't they only help each other? Every league game that they play from now on is essentially just the hockey east giving themselves quality win bonuses due to their high pairwise standing which only helps the league get even better in the pairwise, not worse. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but the league should only get better in the pairwise, not worse as conference play happens through the rest of the year, right?

Someone has to lose every game. OOC peak record can be 1.000. League games peak record is .500.

Right but we're talking pairwise not record. A conference can only move up or down in the pairwise based on non conference play, no? Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see how conference play will hurt these teams when they are all very high in the pairwise, and therefore all guaranteed a very good strength of schedule the rest of the way.

[adamw]

You definitely want to listen to this week's podcast when it's out

Kind of off topic for this thread but I had a question about the podcast. Toward the end Adam inferred that because hockey east is so high in the pairwise and pretty much only has league play to go, they will essentially beat each other up in the pairwise. But, since the conference has so many teams in the top 20 and non con play is basically done, shouldn't they only help each other? Every league game that they play from now on is essentially just the hockey east giving themselves quality win bonuses due to their high pairwise standing which only helps the league get even better in the pairwise, not worse. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but the league should only get better in the pairwise, not worse as conference play happens through the rest of the year, right?

Someone has to lose every game. OOC peak record can be 1.000. League games peak record is .500.

Right but we're talking pairwise not record. A conference can only move up or down in the pairwise based on non conference play, no? Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see how conference play will hurt these teams when they are all very high in the pairwise, and therefore all guaranteed a very good strength of schedule the rest of the way.

Because a loss is still a loss. A loss vs. a good opponent is still worse than a win vs. a weak opponent, in most cases. Especially since if you win vs. a weak opponent and your RPI goes down, that game is thrown out.

0         + (.6 x .75) = .45   loss vs. strong opp.
(1 x .25) + (.4 x .75) = .55   win vs. weak opp.

[Trotsky]

A conference can only move up or down in the pairwise based on non conference play, no?

Correct.  Conference games cancel for conference strength.

[adamw]

A conference can only move up or down in the pairwise based on non conference play, no?

Correct.  Conference games cancel for conference strength.

right - but 25% of your RPI still your own Win% ... and OppWin% and OppOppWin% don't have as much variance as a team's own Win%

[upprdeck]

We talk about this all the time and I still can't understand how much playing less games plays into our PWR

Would 5-6 more games against just decent mid level teams help us or not just by playing them.

Kinda like the SEC FB pwr gets inflated because they beat up on the bad teams and then play all good not great teams vs a team that plays a few good teams and then a bunch of bad teams.

go 4-2 vs bad and 4-4 vs good vs a team that goes 8-4 vs bad and 1-1 vs good.   Both teams could be the same quality but one played a harder schedule.

kinda like what would happen with the PWR if you could make up 4-6 games and add them vs teams to see how the PWR would change.

[ugarte]

We talk about this all the time and I still can't understand how much playing less games plays into our PWR

Would 5-6 more games against just decent mid level teams help us or not just by playing them.

Kinda like the SEC FB pwr gets inflated because they beat up on the bad teams and then play all good not great teams vs a team that plays a few good teams and then a bunch of bad teams.

go 4-2 vs bad and 4-4 vs good vs a team that goes 8-4 vs bad and 1-1 vs good.   Both teams could be the same quality but one played a harder schedule.

kinda like what would happen with the PWR if you could make up 4-6 games and add them vs teams to see how the PWR would change.

it depends on how many times we cycle the puck until it gets tipped to neutral ice

[Trotsky]

We talk about this all the time and I still can't understand how much playing less games plays into our PWR

Would 5-6 more games against just decent mid level teams help us or not just by playing them.

Kinda like the SEC FB pwr gets inflated because they beat up on the bad teams and then play all good not great teams vs a team that plays a few good teams and then a bunch of bad teams.

go 4-2 vs bad and 4-4 vs good vs a team that goes 8-4 vs bad and 1-1 vs good.   Both teams could be the same quality but one played a harder schedule.

kinda like what would happen with the PWR if you could make up 4-6 games and add them vs teams to see how the PWR would change.

it depends on how many times we cycle the puck until it gets tipped to neutral ice

Don't give away our power play secrets!