The Wildcard Boost: Myth or Lore?

[Victor 10,940]

Is this a tentative VHL lore topic? I don't think so actually. A deeply entrenched fear of curses and jinxes is part and parcel of VHL history. We were all once upon a time firm believers of the “3-1 curse”, where the team leading 3-1 in a playoff series proceeded to lose the next 3 games and get knocked out in 7, until I debunked the claim as just something that happened to be prominent for a couple seasons in high-profile playoff series. We've still had notable comebacks since then and in recent times, but nothing more than you would expect statistically.

 

Just the other week @CowboyinAmerica looked at the ongoing Victory Cup curse, where we've not seen a regular season champions back it up in the post-season in over a decade. I wonder if that's linked to this topic. Since S73, every Victory Cup winner has had to face a wildcard round winner following the final round of league and playoff expansion. The percentage of successful Victory Cup winners has fallen sharply since then, especially if you take out those that were meta-boosted in the S78-S82 range. You could argue that this is due to increased league parity as a whole, as we have seen a couple of the wildcard teams go all the way to winning the Continental Cup. Fortunately, we are not limited by just a post-S73 sample size. A wildcard round existed in the short-lived one conference era of S58 to S65, while in the 27 seasons before that (S31-S57), one team per conference received a bye to the conference finals which had the same effect as facing a wildcard team – one team was coming off the back of a series win, while the other (the favourite) idled around for a week.

 

So we have a significant amount of data to parse through. I'll go through the effort of typing it all out. Fortunately, my handy playoff summary spreadsheet saves me from having to go into every index since S31. In any case, I'll start with the most recent run since S73. I will list out every wildcard round winner (2 per season) and give them a record in a W-D-L format i.e. one for making it further than the next round, one for winning just the conference semi-final, and one for losing immediately.

 

For example, S94 Moscow would be noted down as 1-0-0 having won the wildcard round and gone all the way to win the cup. S94 Vancouver by contrast will be 0-0-1, having lost immediately after winning the wildcard. Last season's Davos would be 0-1-0 – won the wildcard, upset Malmo in the next round, but went no further.

 

Let's begin our assessment of some serious lore.

 

S95: Davos 0-1-0, Seattle 0-0-1 (running total: 0-1-1)

S94: Moscow 1-0-0, Vancouver 0-0-1 (1-1-2)

S93: Moscow 0-1-0, New York 0-0-1 (1-2-3)

S92: London 1-0-0, Toronto 0-1-0 (2-3-3)

S91: Helsinki 1-0-0, D.C. 0-0-1 (3-3-4)

S90: London 0-0-1, Vancouver 0-0-1 (3-3-6)

S89: Prague 0-1-0, New York 0-1-0 (3-5-6)

S88: London 1-0-0, Vancouver 0-0-1 (4-5-7)

S87: Riga 0-0-1, Seattle 0-1-0 (4-6-8)

S86: Davos 0-1-0, Vancouver 1-0-0 (5-7-8)

S85: Davos 0-0-1, Chicago 0-1-0 (5-8-9)

S84: Davos 0-0-1, Calgary 0-0-1 (5-8-11)

S83: Prague 0-0-1, Chicago 0-0-1 (5-8-13)

S82: Moscow 1-0-0, Seattle 0-0-1 (6-8-14)

S81: Warsaw 0-0-1, Toronto 0-0-1 (6-8-16)

S80: Prague 0-0-1, Los Angeles 0-0-1 (6-8-18)

S79: Davos 0-0-1, D.C. 0-0-1 (6-8-20)

S78: Malmo 0-0-1, D.C. 0-0-1 (6-8-22)

S77: Prague 0-0-1, Los Angeles 0-1-0 (6-9-23)

S76: Prague 0-0-1, Seattle 0-0-1 (6-9-25)

S75: Moscow 0-1-0, Chicago 0-1-0 (6-11-25)

S74: Helsinki 1-0-0, D.C. 0-0-1 (7-11-26)

S73: Malmo 0-0-1, D.C. 0-0-1 (7-11-28)

 

OK so that's an interesting bit of binary code. Out of 46 wildcard winners in modern VHL history, 18 have gone on to win the following round of the playoffs. That is slightly less than half but still feels a bit high given these teams face the best team in the conference based on the regular season. Obviously point totals have on occasion been quite close where there's not much separating the top 4-5 teams in the conference, but it still feels like a reasonably high percentage of upsets.

 

What is particularly telling is that a lot of the wildcard success stories have come in the last 10 seasons. 7 of the 18 “upsets” went on to make the cup finals, 5 of which have been since S86, including the 3 champions (Vancouver, London, and Moscow) who started off in the wildcard round. There appears to be a trend towards wildcards having more success, especially in the European Conference where the wildcard winner has defeated the regular season champion in each of the last 5 seasons, and three of them have been the European representative in the finals.

 

But let's look at what history from more bygone eras tells us before jumping to conclusions. Starting with the one conference era, this was a time with just 5 playoff teams in total, two of which fought it out for a spot in the semi-finals where they faced the Victory Cup winners. Let's see how they fared.

 

S65: Helsinki – defeated Seattle, lost in finals

S64: Toronto – won Continental Cup

S63: Quebec – lost to Riga

S62: Seattle – lost to Calgary

S61: New York – lost to Calgary

S60: Calgary – lost to New York

S59: Seattle – won Continental Cup

S58: New York – lost to Riga

 

Again, slight advantage to the teams that didn't have to go through the wildcard round but only very slight – 3 out of 8 wildcard winners made it to the finals, and 2 of them pulled off underdog championships. Let's move on to the original expansion era where I'll swap back to the W-D-L format being champion, finalist, and lost in conference final respectively (we've got 6 playoff teams in total here, the top 2 skipping round one, so we are tracking how the winners of the first round fared).

 

S57: Helsinki 0-0-1, Toronto 0-0-1 (0-0-2)

S56: Davos 0-1-0, Calgary 0-0-1 (0-1-3)

S55: Davos 0-0-1, New York 0-0-1 (0-1-5)

S54: Helsinki 1-0-0, New York 0-0-1 (1-1-6)

S53: Helsinki 0-0-1, New York 1-0-0 (2-1-7)

S52: Cologne 0-0-1, New York 1-0-0 (3-1-8)

S51: Cologne 0-0-1, Toronto 0-1-0 (3-2-9)

S50: Davos 0-1-0, Quebec 0-0-1 (3-3-10)

S49: Riga 0-0-1, Toronto 1-0-0 (4-3-11)

S48: Stockholm 0-0-1, Seattle 0-0-1 (4-3-13)

S47: Stockholm 0-1-0, Calgary 0-0-1 (4-4-14)

S46: Davos 0-0-1, Calgary 0-1-0 (4-5-15)

S45: Davos 0-0-1, Calgary 0-1-0 (4-6-16)

S44: Davos 0-0-1, Calgary 1-0-0 (5-6-17)

S43: Cologne 0-1-0, Seattle 1-0-0 (6-7-17)

S42: Cologne 1-0-0, New York 0-0-1 (7-7-18)

S41: Helsinki 0-0-1, Quebec 0-0-1 (7-7-20)

S40: Riga 1-0-0, Calgary 0-0-1 (8-7-21)

S39: Riga 0-0-1, Seattle 0-0-1 (8-7-23)

S38: Riga 0-0-1, Toronto 0-1-0 (8-8-24)

S37: Riga 0-0-1, Seattle 0-0-1 (8-8-26)

S36: Helsinki 0-0-1, Quebec 0-0-1 (8-8-28)

S35: Cologne 0-0-1, Calgary 0-0-1 (8-8-30)

S34: Riga 0-0-1, Calgary 0-1-0 (8-9-31)

S33: Riga 1-0-0, Calgary 0-0-1 (9-9-32)

S32: Riga 0-1-0, New York 1-0-0 (10-10-32)

S31: Riga 0-0-1, New York 0-1-0 (10-11-33)

 

Not a hugely different outcome here from the current era, where 21 out of 54 (compared to 18 out of 46) teams with a “boost” from a previous series win took that momentum to at least one more series win afterwards. It is worth caveating here that because the S31-S57 era didn't have a true wildcard round, there were multiple occasions here where this was simply a case of 2nd place beating 1st place, but having had to beat an inferior opponent in round one to begin with. On the whole, I would say this era had a lower degree of unpredictability which might make it less comparable to the league today.

 

Across all three distinct era then, the final results are as follows:

• 108 teams which played and won an extra round while their opponent rested / had a bye
• 42 of them (39%) beat their next opponent, on paper the favourite based on regular season results
• 20 of those winning teams went on to win at least one more playoff series, which you could argue is evidence that they were pretty good teams coming off a regular season underperformance. Of course, you could also cynically argue that means that the boost from winning a playoff series carries significant momentum for more than one subsequent series.

 

Is that overall percentage a concern? I don't think so. If we dug deeper in the detail, we'd find that quite a few of the “upsets” were from good teams who had slow regular seasons but played to their potential in the playoffs. There have also been numerous seasons where the gap between the regular season leader and the underdog wasn't so large, both in terms of points and quality on paper. So really the percentage of genuine surprising wins is probably lower than shown above, at which point it becomes something you would statistically expect to happen every now and then.

 

Plus, even if there was an unfair advantage to teams playing a wildcard round, how would we go about fixing it? You could decrease the amount of playoff teams to 4 per conference which would mean half the league misses the playoffs. That's not a terrible idea in principle and would be the same as the current 32-team NHL, plus the team that loses the wildcard round doesn't get a lot of playoff action (2-3 days) anyway, and it would shorten the post-season slightly for everyone else. However, we have evidence in recent seasons of 5th place teams being very competitive and even being crowned champions, so denying them the opportunity doesn't seem fair or reflective of the balance of the VHL at the moment.

 

So with that, I declare the alleged wildcard boost to be a myth and something to be confined into the depths of VHL lore.

[Victor 10,940]

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