How in the hell did THEY win?
 

Playing a fictional 14 team league. Two years after first expansion, one of the expansion teams, Texas, makes it to the playoffs. In the semi's they meet up with Ottawa, fully healthy defending champs, top team of the league (113 pts) with several top producing players on it. I edit Texas' lineup, sending 6 of it's best players to the injury list including both goaltenders and their top scorer. So what happens? Texas knocks off Ottawa. In the finals they go up against Pittsburgh, the only other team to break 100 pts, and who wins it all? Texas! Seriously?!?! How does an injury depleted expansion team starting a half star goalie beat two of the best teams in the game 4 times a piece? I know there's some random element in the calculations, but this is ridiculous. A sports managemnet game is supposed to be about crafting the best team. But what's the point if the computer is just going to arbitrarily give the championship to some pre determined team no matter what?

It's not no matter what. It's one sim. If you were to save that state and re-sim the outcome 100 times, you would get different results.

Hockey is filled with anomalies every year. Nobody saw Pittsburgh win it all last year. Nobody saw Montreal winning it all in 93. The Hurricanes winning the cup ? Brad Marchand suddenly becoming a top player ? Give me a break.

But it's sports. And sports sim has to emulate the real world. And stats prove that the team that wins it all in the playoffs is, more often than not, not the team that finished at the top of the league in the regular season.

Now, if you were to run a test with the same setup and sim 100 times and always get the same result, obviously at that point there would be an issue.

Sports would be boring if rooting for an underdog meant 100% of the time you would lose.

Why would you edit an expansion team to the point where you think they'd be obliterated? You'd think, by definition, the expansion team would be weak anyway, but you did your best to ensure that team was destroyed...and yet it wasn't.

I agree that it's an anomaly, and the much weaker team should have lost, and probably would, more often than not, if you did the sim 100x, or 200x or whatever...but you tried to guarantee they'd get smoked. Why?

Your suggestion about a "pre-determined result" when you manipulated one team to the point where you had virtually guaranteed the result (but got the opposite result, which I agree is a surprise) is a bit left-of-center, if you ask me.

It was an experiment.

Of course there's going to be upsets. But do you seriously believe it's possible for, say, the Toronto Marlies to beat the Washington Capitals and Chicago Blackhawks 8 times this year?
Pittsburgh still had some top quality players on it's team last year. Montreal had one of the league's best goalies in 93. Carolina was a 112 point team. Yes, none of these teams were picked, but looking back, you can see how they were able to win.

Small sample size and everything can happen anytime. How was Leister City able to win the Premier League last year (people who bet on it before the season got 1/500 on it ;)). If you sim the PO´s 1000 times and the edited expansion team still wins most of the cups, we need to look into it.

I agree. I just didn't agree with the "no matter what" statement that made it sound like results are pre-determined.

I still think it would be a great idea if you could make that sim 100 times (if you have the time - you did say it was an experiment) because if the depleted team wins all or most of those, then maybe there is something wrong. I wouldn't put it on one sim to make such determinations though.

I don't want to rule out a bug, thats always possible. But look through the last few years and see how far the team with the most points came (hint: Most of they time they don't win it all). In one PO sim anything can happen. In fhm no result is pre-determined (otherwise simulating a game twice would result in the same score). If you sim the po's a few times and the edited team wins them all of the time, then there is something wrong.