jimdahl

While UND certainly needs to win to move on to the NCAA tournament, I think this overstates it a little. I think an at-large bid is well within reach if the boys win more than they lose.

UND still with a little more downside potential than upside. Still a very good chance of an at-large bid if UND wins more than it loses. As previously mentioned, this is using the CHN implementation (for USCHO readers, their PWR is a bit different).

CHN just finished theirs a week or two ago. But, while they were working on it they still had the old table posted, so I was warning people that their posted table was wrong. Now that they've finished it, their's seems more correct to me. In short, in trying to do it myself before USCHO or CHN did it, I found out how basketball applied the weights and did that (even though it seemed subpar). When USCHO came out with their's about a month ago, they did the same thing I had done, so I assumed it must be correct (even though it had proven pretty quirky as I was trying to implement it). Once CHN did it the other way and declared they were sure they were right, I now think USCHO just did what I did -- found out how basketball does it and assumed that must be how hockey does. But, basketball's implementation doesn't work well with the dropped games. So, I'm going to start moving entirely to the CHN calculation (though will maintain the ability to run USCHO's if we get more information in the future).

Yeah, the conference playoffs can definitely help. But, keep in mind that if you don't win it all you get at least one loss. So, if an at-large bid matters for you, you're probably adding something like 3-1 or 4-1 at best. For teams around 15 in PWR, that can be enough to push you in; but generally not if you're down around 20. (At least under the old PWR, the new one seems a little easier to climb from 20 to 13-14). For what it's worth, I like CHN's PWR slightly better than USCHO's (objective, not because of how UND performs). I've spent the last week working on duplicating it, so now should be able to run CHN's or both going forward.

UND PWR outlook with 10 games to go The "end of regular season" chart moved exactly how it should have for a split since the last one. The "one week" chart shows a lot of downside potential (which fits with the other chart's claim that UND needs to go 7/10 just to keep up with its current ranking or climb slightly). Note that I'm still using the USCHO formula, because it's the one I had working first. Still working on the CHN formula.

As I posted on collegehockeyranked, there's some new uncertainty in how to implement this year's revised RPI/PWR. CHN has published their tables for the first time, noting that they're different from everyone else's, but that they're sure they're right. I've been in communication with both them and USCHO, and I'm not sure there's going to be a quick resolution to this. So, for now, we probably shouldn't be treating anyone's PWR tables as quite so much a "fact" as we did in past years. For now, SiouxSports' tables match USCHO, though I'll definitely watch both carefully and try to do some analysis as to how different the two techniques really are.

Enjoy!

Is the NCHC really slumping? How many teams will each conference place in the NCAA tournament? Sneak peek:

Yep. Until we see the tournament picks exactly match the rankings, I'm not completely confident that the transparency we're all accustomed to has continued. We'll see.

Nah, it's you guys' board. Creating new forums is no effort whatsoever. Volleyball is probably next in line for its own sport conference. The only reason we don't do it automatically for all sports is that having its own forum can improve discussion about a sport by letting a sport thread break up into multiple threads, but can also kill it by reducing traffic. Recent success has definitely helped volleyball, so this is probably the peak time in the past decade. If anyone else has comments, feel free to pipe up.

Ok, I think it's working: NCHC Standings What If It was a major redo (the old version still had the 2005 SiouxSports banner!), so there could be some quirks. Just let me know if anything seems wrong.

The memo USCHO posted didn't say anything about treating conference games differently, but I don't know anything more than what I pieced together from that and CHN's article. Neither USCHO nor I treat conference games differently in our current PWR tables; but, there's no way to be sure any of us have it right until we see what matches up with the actual selections.

And the new wrinkle -- RPI now cares where you win/lose. So, it still doesn't matter who you beat, it matters who you play against (stronger opponents are better) and it matters how much and where you win. Though it is already factored into the PWR forecast I posted earlier, I will try to put together some more detailed "what can happen to RPI" stats in coming weeks on the RPI details pages (which I used to have there, but have yet to redo with the new formulas).

Ok, I have forecasts, including the important "what does UND need to do for the rest of the season": UND's PWR -- A look ahead

Here's a first forecast for the season... here's what is likely to happen to UND's PWR this weekend. The main takeaway is that pretty big moves are possible.

As I mentioned in the other thread, discussions of moderation policy don't belong in hockey threads. We're always happy to discuss, but please take it to the siouxsports/admin forum.

That's what my post was -- a nudge to more than one person in the thread that it was drifting into becoming personal rather than on topic. If you want to discuss moderation policies more, I'd urge you to move it to the the SiouxSports/admin forum.

We're straying a bit, please get back to "Al Pearson's upcoming road trip buses".

Two part answer: For RPI, non-conference doesn't really matter, but home/road does. So, the road game at Bemidji is actually twice as important to our weighted win% as the home game vs. Bemidji. For PWR, the impact to RPI will affect our comparison to teams close to us, but the comparison with Bemidji St isn't really in jeopardy. With only three criteria in the new PWR, each comparison comes down to RPI except when there are head-to-head match ups. Looking at UND's PWR comparisons, UND currently takes both RPI and COP (by a huge margin). If Bemidji took both head-to-head games, that would result in a 2-2 tie, so the comparison would still go to UND on the basis of RPI. If Bemidji took both head-to-head games and eventually took RPI or COP, UND would lose the comparison. But, unless Bemidji goes an amazing surge, that would mean UND had fallen so far it wouldn't matter much anyway.

CHN does not appear to be using the new formula yet. USCHO, Reilly Hamilton (on the USCHO forums), and I arrived at pretty much identical (Reilly has one slight difference) tables through independent development based on the NCAA's memo. It's possible that we all misinterpreted something, but USCHO generally has reasonably good connections to the committee, which increases my confidence.

Without labeling them as such, they're putting in the traditional record (e.g. each W, L, or T is 1 point) but the weighted win percentage (home wins/road losses worth .8, home losses/road wins worth 1.2). You can see the weighted records (along with lots of other info behind the calculations of the new RPI) on the RPI team details pages here: North Dakota RPI details Those are still works in progress, given all the changes.

Yeah, will do soon. Having the new point system the same year as a new RPI meant I spent the Fall getting the basic standings/RPI up-to-date. Am slowly getting the calculators and such working now.

I'll just leave this here...

Or if you're on a computer (as most readers still are): fightingsioux.com gfherald.com espn.com sportsillustrated.com etc.... believe it or not, when I started this site none of those places were reliable sources for any UND scores (nor yet was USCHO for hockey). Not to mention facebook, twitter, etc... Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to drive people away or say I'm not interested in continuing to try to meet the demand for scores. I get the appeal of one stop (scores, news, forums, etc...) shopping for UND sports info. I just want to make sure that I can do it right before I do it.