2016 Stanley Cup Final Preview

I lost track of the second round playoff series in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, so I forgot to get a post in for the conference finals. Fortunately, I have plenty of time to get the Cup Final prediction in.

After the first round, we lost our last four Cup winners, as well as five of the last six, with a guarantee that we'll have a team that hasn't won a Cup since as far back as 2009. It's an interesting new matchup that, even if may not be a sexy ratings pick, is a compelling storyline and will be a series between two very, very good teams that deserve to be here.

Stanley Cup Final

San Jose Sharks (46-30-6, Beat Kings in five, beat Predators in seven, beat Blues in six) vs Pittsburgh Penguins (48-26-8, Beat Rangers in five, beat Capitals in six, beat Lightning in seven)
Teams each won 1 of 2 regular season meetings

Photo by Rocky W. Widner (NHL/Getty Images)

The Penguins have been a league darling for a decade straight now, but haven't made much postseason noise, making just their third Cup Final in that stretch and their first since they won the Cup in 2009. They take on a Sharks team that is making its first ever trip to the final round after years of missed opportunities. Pittsburgh has been fairly balanced in its scoring, with eight players recording at least 10 points through three rounds. Phil Kessel leads the team in goals (nine) and points (18), while media darling Sidney Crosby has played very well to the tune of six goals and nine assists, though he is a -2. They're getting a little thin on defense, with Trevor Daley out now, but young goaltender Matt Murray has been phenomenal with a .924 save percentage and a 2.22 goals against average. On the other end, Martin Jones has played incredibly well as well, with a slightly worse save percentage (.919) but a better goals against average (2.12). San Jose's offense has been more potent, with Logan Couture (eight goals, 16 assists) and Joe Pavelski (13 goals, nine assists) leading the charge, and an excellent defensive group with only two skaters logging a negative plus/minus. Brent Burns is +8 so far, while Marc-Edouard Vlasic is a team-high +13. They're going to need to be on their game all the more against a star studded Pittsburgh attack.

My heart wants to take the Sharks here, because I can't stand the lovefest for Sidney Crosby who has done nothing in the Kane-Toews-Keith-Q Dynasty and also because they saved the black cat that scrambled onto the ice during Game 1 against Nashville and found her a forever home. My head is initially leaning Pittsburgh because Crosby and company seem to have finally figured things out after six years of playoff disappointment that had featured only one trip to the Eastern Conference Finals. With their issues of defensive depth against a ferocious attack though, I'm thinking I should switch sides. It's going to be a long, hard-fought series, but at the end of the day, give me the newcomers and the debate of who Pavelski hands the Cup to first: Patrick Marleau or Joe Thornton. Sharks in seven.

Conn Smythe Trophy Winner: Joe Pavelski, Sharks

2016 NBA/ABA Tournament of Champions: ABA Seeding Tournament

It's time to get the 2016 Tournament of Champions underway!

If you read my intro post, you know I'm going bigger this year. I didn't feel that it was enough to just bring in the 2016 NBA Champion. This time, since I had the resources, I wanted to include the nine ABA champions in the mix as well.

I have no idea how good these teams are in relation to the NBA champions that have participated in the last two tournaments, and I wasn't sure at first how I wanted to integrate the ABA teams into this. Originally, I was going to have seven groups of nine teams from the NBA for pool play and have the ABA be its own group. However, that guarantees four ABA teams advancing to the Elimination Round, and I'm not convinced those teams deserve four guaranteed spots.

Thus, the fairest way to do this is to pre-rank the ABA champions, and to do that, I am having those nine teams spend the early part of the month of May playing a round robin tournament. This one is only a single round robin to minimize the mileage on these players, though they'll have a month after this to rest up and prepare for the big time. In the grand scheme of things, these games don't really mean anything other than pride and the best ABA champion getting to avoid the '96 Bulls until the Elimination Round.

So, here's ultimately how this is going to work. The placing by each ABA team in this portion of the tournament will correspond to which pool that ABA team will join for the filling of the eight groups for Group Play. My simulator doesn't do neutral courts in the NBA, and normally given the schedule this would be a problem, as I usually play with the left team on the road at the right team. However, my scheduler decided to put the '73 Pacers on the left hand side of every round, which would have them playing eight road games while four teams get five home games. I went through and remedied this issue on the schedule page, with the Pacers' home games getting a special note to signify it. With this in place, every team will play four games at home and four games on the road, all determined randomly (including the case of the changed games, where I just switched home teams for the '73 Pacers).

In the event of a tie in the standings, head to head record will take care of any two-way tie. In the event of a three or more-team tie, head to head record will remain the top tiebreaker, but in case there's a rock-paper-scissors tie, I will go down to record against teams above the tie, then record against teams below the tie, then point differential. All simulations are once again provided by WhatIfSports.com.

Good luck to these ABA teams, and welcome to the Tournament of Champions!

2016 Stanley Cup Playoffs Second Round Preview

I don't think I needed the couple days to digest the Hawks falling short in Game 7 against St. Louis. It's a bummer and a disappointment, but the Blues are a very good team, and they earned their first trip to the second round under Ken Hitchcock. I tip my cap.

I ended up doing a terrible job overall predicting the first round this year, and the scheduling weirdness means that this is getting posted after the second round gets underway. But in the interest of full disclosure, I wrote my preview for the one game taking place on Wednesday of the second round in advance, because I had to wait for the Game 7 between Nashville and Anaheim to be played out to fully preview this round.

With a (somewhat) heavy heart, I soldier on. Here are my predictions for the next round.

The Tyrant Wins Again

So I'm using a Crying Jordan meme as my cover photo for this post. Sue me. A, I think it's funny, and B, it pretty perfectly captures just what's going on in sports today.

The NFL has once again made headlines for a terrible reason as the Deflategate Phoenix rises from the ashes again. The US Court of Appeals reversed last year's ruling nullifying Tom Brady's suspension, and reinstated it effective immediately. A copy of the court's ruling can be found here. The CliffNotes version of it, based on my admittedly limited knowledge of legal mumbo jumbo, is that the NFL's collective bargaining agreement with the NFL Players' Association allows Roger Goodell a wide latitude of judgment power, and that what happened with Brady's arbitration hearing was within the scope of that power.

Again, based on how I understand the CBA and the law, the court appears to have gotten this one right. A court of law just isn't going to overrule the finding of an arbitrator in a labor dispute unless some very shady stuff happened. I think some shady stuff definitely happened in how the hearing was handled, but clearly the bargaining agreement allows Goodell this power.

So now, Tom Brady is out for the first four games of the 2016 season, barring an appeal either to the full Appeals Court or an appeal all the way up to the Supreme Court, neither of whom is likely to waste their time on an issue about footballs losing air pressure due to cold, wet weather. On the legal front, it's no surprise, and I'm not going to argue about how the court system got it wrong, because they didn't. This case was never about the evidence itself, it was about the process, which is apparently all good.

That last point is what should scare NFL fans, and more so players. Roger Goodell now has, for all intents and purposes, carte blanche to do whatever the hell he wants on a whim. Many people are thrilled with this decision because of confirmation bias and the NFL's smear campaign that will never go away because the league is too powerful. What is to stop Goodell from destroying another team's season based on misinformation? Per the collective bargaining agreement, nothing.

I touched on this back in September when the original ruling came down, and I want to bring up a similar point today. The agreement currently in place does not expire until 2020, and there are no opt out clauses. We have a few more seasons of this garbage, and there is only one way that we can make sure that this railroading never happens again: the NFL Players' Association needs to go on strike. This is clearly an extreme reaction, but it's one that I'm only half-joking about. I would be bummed to not have football on Sundays. But honestly, I think it's something that needs to be done. The only reason this fiasco is still in the news is because Roger Goodell's ego needed to be stroked. He couldn't handle continued embarrassment at the hands of a player, so he had to make sure that The Shield remained impenetrable, even if it meant going after one of the league's marquee players. How much more would Goodell do if it were a run-of-the-mill offensive lineman? Or a backup linebacker? The only way to make sure that this process is more fair for all involved is to force a change to the CBA, and the only way to do that is with a labor stoppage.

Unfortunately, with money to be made, I doubt the union will take this step, and the fans would riot if it did. This means we are stuck with a buffoon in charge of America's most popular sport, and because money continues to pour in, he's not going anywhere. And it's a damn shame.

2016 NBA/ABA Tournament of Champions Preview

I told myself after last year's tournament that I wouldn't do this again this summer. I told myself it would take too much time and too much effort, and that I couldn't find a way to justify doing another one. But the itch is back, and that means a tournament is back in the works.

I am back once again to find the greatest single season basketball team of all time, even though my prior two experiments ended with the exact same results. That said, with the sort of media attention the 2016 Golden State Warriors have gotten, it has me thinking. The simplest solution would be to just simulate a game between them and the '96 Bulls, but there are a couple hiccups. First and foremost, the 2016 champion has not been determined even though the Warriors are the heavy favorites (which I'm sure has you questioning why I'm doing an intro post so early), but second of all, I'm insane and want to make this process fully involved.

This year's tournament is going to have multiple stages, partially out of necessity. The main reason I even did a second NBA Tournament of Champions last summer was because the initial field for the 2013 Tournament of Champions was incomplete since my 1950 and 1951 champions weren't in my simulator. I waited a couple years to refill the field to get that 64th team. That means this year, there are 65 NBA champions available to make it into the field. To make the math pretty, that means someone has to go. However, I am expanding the field even further to take advantage of a resource that my simulator does provide: the nine seasons' worth of champions from the ABA. It's an interesting premise, since the two leagues didn't really interact much outside of court and the negotiation room prior to the 1977 merger.

This gives us 74 teams competing for the honor of being the greatest team of all time (or the '96 Bulls fighting off all of the blasphemers daring to infringe on their territory, depending on your point of view). Needless to say, 74 is a bit of a weird number when it comes to a tournament, so I need to narrow the field ever so slightly. With that in mind, I am seeding the 64 teams from last year's championship based on their 2013 and 2015 performances (with the knowledge that this is a disadvantage to the '14 Spurs and '15 Warriors, but not a huge one). These teams will be ranked 1-64, with the 2016 NBA Champion getting put in at spot number 33 before I move everyone below them down a spot. I'm then going to break up the field into groups of seven, with the top seven teams being in one, then teams 8-14, and so on, until we get to the last nine teams. The top few teams from that group of 57-65 will all be safely in, but the lowest seeded teams will play in their own double robin group, with the bottom two teams dropping out and narrowing the field to 72 teams.

That begs the question of how I am going to rank the ABA teams. For them, I am going to play a single round robin between their nine champions in the next couple of weeks. No ABA teams will be eliminated at this stage; rather, this is a ranking system where they will get combined into the groups of seven NBA champions corresponding to their finish in this round robin tournament. This is an effort to, as fairly as possible, rank the ABA teams in relation to the NBA teams and get them integrated into the tournament with as little bias as possible.

Once those rankings and the play in round are completed, the 2016 Tournament of Champions will proceed almost identically to the 2015 iteration. The 72 teams will be broken up into eight groups of nine teams apiece where they will play a double round robin. I'm keeping the same format of four pools playing a day with the knowledge that there will be a few back to backs amongst this followed by at least one day off, and every team will get a pair of byes just based on how the math with this will work out. Once again, the top four teams from each pool will advance into the Elimination Round, which will follow the familiar best-of-sever series matchup.

I hope you're as excited for this new installment of the Tournament of Champions! Stay tuned in the next couple of weeks as I unveil the results of the ABA seeding process and unveil the teams who will be playing in the play in round.

2016 Stanley Cup Playoffs First Round Preview

We're onto one of the most fun times of the year, but also one of the most gut wrenching. The Stanley Cup Playoffs are a wonderful two month stretch of the best hockey of the year.

16 teams have survived the 82 game grind to reach this point, but only one will be hoisting Lord Stanley in June, and they have to win four best-of-sevens to get there. There's a reason many call the Cup the toughest trophy in all of sports to win.

So like I did last year, I am going to go into each round and try to predict a winner. I'm actually going to try and do a little analysis this time as well, and I will close this post out with my prediction for the Stanley Cup Final going into the playoffs as well.

Let's start with the obvious one.

2016 MLB Predictions: AL Central

Happy Opening Day! All of the doldrums from winter can fade away now with the beginning of another spring and summer at the ballpark.

I've previewed five divisions, following my practice of saving the division with the World Series champion for last. I've also handed out all four wild card berths for my set of predictions, so only one team today is making the playoffs. Without further ado, here are my predictions for the AL Central.