Is Malmo just not built to compete in the playoffs?

[scoop 3,432]

In the wake of yet another early exit from the playoffs for the Malmo Nighthawks, I can't help but wonder if it's just bad luck, or if there is something in particular with the composition of the team. We have been successful in the regular season, winning two Victory Cups over the last four seasons, but the playoffs have been a completely different story. Since Season 91, we have a league-leading 0.674 winning percentage in the regular season, but this drops down to 0.211 in the playoffs. To my knowledge, the simulator does not operate differently from the regular season to the post-season. This is a simulation, not the real world; there are no intangibles. There is no clutch factor or players crumbling under the pressure. The obvious difference, however, is that in the regular season, everyone also plays against the bad teams. With that in mind, what I am more interested in is how teams have performed during the regular season against only the other playoff teams, and that's what I'll be investigating here.

 

I am writing this with Malmo in mind, so that's where I am going to start. As you would expect, our win percentage is lower against playoff teams than the league overall. With 95 wins and 75 losses against playoff teams, Malmo does actually still top the league with a 0.559 win percentage. Not farm behind are Toronto (0.552) and London (0.547). That all makes sense, considering these are the three teams that have made the playoffs in all of those seasons. It's not just that they have been competitive this whole time, but they have had the best single seasons in terms of win percentage against playoff teams. In Season 93, Malmo went 27-13-1. Toronto this year went 28-10-5. London went 29-10-6 in Season 91. There have been seven times that a team had a win percentage over 60 percent against playoff teams; Malmo and Toronto each account for two of those.

 

I am not digging a great deal into how well these other teams performed in the playoffs. What I do have is information on how well the Continental Cup finalists have fared during the regular season. It's fairly well known that recent Victory Cup winners have not found much success in the playoffs (Toronto is looking to put an end to that this season), but you would at least think that the teams that have been winning the playoffs were doing relatively well in the regular season. Some of them have. Seattle in Season 93 and Toronto in Season 91 had winning regular season records before going on to win it all. Add in Toronto this season, and that is the list of the conference champions who had winning regular season records against playoff teams. The other champion, the D.C. Dragons in Season 92, went 18-19-5. Notably, no European Conference representative in the finals has had a winning regular season record; and whoever wins between the Reign and the Menace will have had one of the worst in these past four seasons. Riga went 16-22-5, while Moscow went 14-22-7. Only the Season 93 Chicago Phoenix, who were not legitimate contenders, had a worse record.

 

The point of all this is to say that Malmo can definitely compete playoff teams. In each of the last four seasons, we were better in the regular season than the teams that we lost to in the playoffs. We were better in the regular season than the European Conference champions. Yet we have not won in the playoffs. I think people may point to our lack of elite forwards or an elite goalie in the recent seasons and say that these are the things you need to win in the playoffs. They may say that's why we have struggled. That just does not sit quite right with me, though, because we have clearly shown that we can beat the other playoff teams with our more balanced roster. Maybe other teams are better at changing up their strategies for the playoffs, or maybe there is something in the sim engine that I am not aware of that says goalies play better in the playoffs but only if they have over 1000 TPE. Or maybe it's just a simple case of bad luck.