Quote:
Originally Posted by Charley575
So I looked at some numbers:
Since my team is in the Eastern Conference I sampled the Western Conference only to eliminate any human factors. The league was started in 2000. Wildcards were first introduced in 2007. We are currently in the 2026 season so we have 19 seasons of wildcard play to analyze.
Findings:
The 1 seed won the league championship 9 times (47%). the 2 and 3 seeds each won 5 times (26%).
The 3 seed won the wildcard playoff 9 times over the 2 seed (47%)
The 3 seed won more regular season games than the 2 seed 11 times (58%), including a 99 win wildcard in 2018.
In 2021 there was a pronounced strong division/weak division dynamic. The Milwaukee Bulls won the North division with 85 wins. That's the fewest wins of any team to make the playoffs over the 19 seasons. They also had the only winning record in the North division that year. There were 5 90+ win teams in the South division, and we play with an unbalanced schedule. The Bulls were swept by the 3 seeded Phoenix Cobras (97 wins) in 2 games in Round 1.
A total of just 6 teams made the playoffs win fewer than 90 wins (11% of all playoff teams), and with the exception of the aforementioned 2021 Milwaukee Bulls, none had fewer than 88.
Overall, I'm quite pleased with these results. Thoughts?
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you have a choice of going by position or win pct... if you dind't like 11 times that a higher win team didn't have home advantage?
in mine, it's 100% divisional, so i look at records as apples to oranges and stick with the position from their divisional standings. if there was more interdivisional play, like mlb, i would prefer the win % being the seeding method.