Concerning Sydney Crosby

Ask a causal hockey fan who the best hockey player in the world is, and you are likely to get a variety of answers. Based on the fan's locality, the answer could be Alex Ovechkin, Jonathan Toews, or even a goalie, like Henrik Lundqvist. The most common answer, and the correct one, is Sidney Crosby, center for the Pittsburgh Penguins. Crosby was considered a once-in-a-generation talent when he entered the NHL draft at the age of 18 in 2005. Since 2005, he has established himself as the best player in the world, the face of the NHL, and the clear superior to his chief rival, Alex Ovechkin. 

         

So what makes Crosby so dominant? The short answer is that he is one of the most well rounded players in the league. While he can shoot as well as anyone, and has a legendary backhand, he is also excellent at distributing the puck and creating scoring chances for his line mates. Since he entered the NHL, 65% of his points have come on assists or secondary assists. Players tend to excel statistically when playing with Crosby. His line mates have an average 56% increase in points per 60 minutes when playing with Crosby compared to playing without him. He has the ability to lift mediocre players into great seasons, for instance last year when Chris Kunitz scored 35 goals en route to 68 points, both career highs, and made the Canadian olympic team. That Kunitz was able to accomplish these feats at the age of 34 is a credit to him, but also a demonstration of how Crosby can lift his line mates to a higher level of play. Crosby is also a prolific goal scorer. Last season he scored 36 goals, 7th highest in the league and 3rd amongst centers. Last season, in fact, was one of the best individual seasons ever by an NHL player. Crosby scored 104 points, which by itself is not that impressive. However, one must examine the defensive strength of the entire league. The next highest point-getter in the league was Ryan Getzlaf of Anaheim with 87 points. Last season marked the first time that a player scored over 100 points in a season in which no other player scored more than 90. In one of the most defensively tough seasons in the history of the NHL, Sidney Crosby still managed to score over 100 points, making his 2013-2014 season one of the best individual seasons in NHL history. 

         The main criticism of Sidney Crosby stems from his team's lack of recent success in the playoffs. Since winning the Stanley Cup in 2009 in an epic 7 game series over the Detroit Red Wings, the Penguins have not won a game past the second round of the playoffs (they made the conference finals in 2012-2013 but were swept by the Bruins). However, ascribing team success to one player is an impossibility, especially in hockey, where any player except the goalie can only directly influence a game's outcome for about 20 minutes at the most. However, Crosby's numbers have dropped in the playoffs. In last year's playoffs, after his historically great regular season, Crosby only scored 9 points in 13 games, less than a point a game. In 2012, Crosby scored 15 points in 14 playoff games, but failed to record a single point in the Penguin's 4 game loss to the Boston Bruins. Why do Crosby's numbers decrease in the playoffs? The simple answer is that he is playing better teams. Teams that make the playoffs often have strong defense and coaching, and they realize that the way to stop the Penguins is to shut down Crosby. He consistently faces the opposing team's top defensive pairing, and they focus on stopping Crosby specifically from scoring. Without consistent depth behind Crosby and second line center Evgeni Malkin, the Penguins lack the ability to take opposing team's defensive focus away from Sidney Crosby. Crosby's numbers suffer as a result, and the strategy often works against the Penguins as a team. Despite this phenomenon, the playoffs are too small a sample size to judge a player's effectiveness by. Crosby has consistently shown himself to be a dominant offensive player in the regular season, which is a much larger sample size. Looking at Crosby's career as a whole reveals him to be the best player in the league, but cherry picking a few games at the end of every year can distort the accurate image of his accomplishments. 

     Sidney Crosby is in the prime of his career right now, and has already accomplished a great deal. He is a 2 time Art Ross (scoring title) and Hart Trophy (MVP) winner, a 4 time All-Star game participant, and a 3 time NHL first-All star team winner. He has set records for being the youngest player ever to record 200 points, record 2 consecutive 100 point seasons, start an All-Star game, win Art Ross Trophy, win the Lester B. Pearson award (peer MVP), be named to the First All-Star team, lead the NHL playoffs in scoring, and captain a Stanley Cup Trophy winner. He has already had one of the best careers in the history of the NHL, and is at most halfway done playing hockey. He is head and shoulders above any other player in the NHL right now.

by Jack Dyro

Fisher Hall

2016 Mechanical Engineering

The World Series Lottery

“My sh*t doesn’t work in the playoffs,” Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane once exasperatedly declared. Since 1998, when Beane became GM of the A’s, the A’s have made the playoffs 8 times. After Tuesday’s loss to the Royals, the A’s have made it out of the first round of the playoffs just once, despite the fact that those eight ball clubs averaged more than 95 wins, which is hardly the mark of a team does not deserve to be in the playoffs.  The A’s have lost in the AL Divisional Series 6 times over the past 15 years; in each series they lost 2 games to 3.

There has been much speculation on why the A’s have not experienced much postseason success with teams that were considered superb by nearly any metric. While falling to the Tigers in the ALDS in both 2012 and 2013, many people speculated that it was a result of their lack of elite pitching, as the Tigers had the best pitching starting pitching in baseball over those two seasons with the best marks in ERA-, FIP, and K/9 from 2012 to 2013¹ The A’s have been regarded to have one of the deepest teams in baseball, but in those two seasons the Tigers had two aces, while the A’s had none.

            In July the A’s responded to the accusations of lack of elite pitching by trading one of the best prospects in baseball, Addison Russell, for a very good starter, Jeff Samardzija. Later that month, the A’s traded outfielder Yoenis Cespedes to the Red Sox for one of the best pitchers in baseball, Jon Lester, who was set to become a free agent at the conclusion of the season. With the emergence of 2^nd year starter Sonny Gray, the A’s now had one of the best starting rotations in baseball. The A’s eventually faltered down the stretch with a record of 22-33 in August and September, yet still finished with 88 wins.

Many baseball pundits claimed that the A’s would not have success in the playoffs because of their late season struggles. At the heart of the A’s collapse was Brandon Moss. From the beginning of the season until July 24,Moss had 23 HRs; According to the stat wRC+, Moss created runs 46% runs above league average.² Over those 392 plate appearances, Moss was having an excellent season. In fact, through the first half of the season, Moss provided the sixteenth most value of any batter in baseball. However, in the second half of the season, Moss was the representative of the A’s collapse.  From July 25 to the end of the season, Moss only hit 2 HRs and was 32% below league average in terms of runs added as a batter. At the end of the season the A’s still finished with the best run differential of any team in baseball, which is more reflective on the quality of a team than wins and losses.

When the A’s played the Royals on Tuesday in the Wild Card game, Moss who had hit 2 HRs in his final 188 plate appearances of the season, hit 2 home runs in the eventual defeat. The A’s over the past 15 years, and Moss this season epitomize the randomness of baseball’s postseason.  The length of a baseball’s postseason is the smallest percentage of games compared to the regular season in any of the four biggest professional sports leagues in the United States: the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL. The playoffs have consisted of 4 teams from each league since the 1995 playoffs’ I am neglecting to account for the change in playoff format with the Wild Card game, due to the fact that the Wild Card game affects only teams that get must play in it, as the division champions still must only win the same amount of games to win the World Series.  Since 2005 only 4 teams that have finished with the best regular season record have managed to win the World Series, the 1998 and 2009 Yankees, as well as the 2007 and 2013 Red Sox. It’s not just exclusive to the team with the best record, over the past 5 years only In fact, if we look at World Series champions over the past 19 years, the only other teams to win it with 95 or more wins are the 2005 White Sox, 2004 Sox, 2002 Angels, 1999 Yankees. In the past 19 seasons, there have been 75 teams with at least 95 wins, all but one made the playoffs, while there were 152 playoff berths. O 8 of the 19 (42.1%) World Series Champions with the current divisional format had at least 95 wins, while teams with 95 wins accounted for 74 of the 152 (48.2%) playoff teams. Although the sample size is too small to draw any significant conclusions, it is surprising, as teams with at least 95 wins over the course of an 162 games would be of a higher caliber.

It would not be unreasonable to suspect that it’s not simply that Billy Beane’s sh*t doesn’t work in the playoffs, but that the World Series Champion is determined by chance once the postseason starts, which begs the question, who will win the lottery this year?

¹ERA- is ballpark and league adjusted ERA. FIP is fielding independent pitching, based on aspects pitchers can control: walks, strikeouts and homeruns. K/9 is strikeouts per 9 innings

²wRC+ is weighted runs above average, adjusted for ballparks and league