Comments by "redfish337" (@redfish337) on "Why underdogs do better in hockey than basketball" video.

  1. The point isn't which requires more skill- it's which sport has that skill translate into wins. For example, some of the Olympic sports are "best of" or give a free flub. Others, it's one and done- one fall, and Olympic dreams in the crapper. You fall in an NBA basketball game, drop the ball, the other team picks it up and scores... and it's 2 points out of 100. You fall in an NHL game and they score on you and it's 1 point out of the 2-3 they probably need to win. Flukes are much more damaging in hockey due to the lower score and greater importance of each goal.
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  2. Baseball is high skill, but since, homeruns aside, you only actually score by chaining together offense- it's like bowling. Look at this ridiculous bowling score: 0. Spare, 0, spare, 0, spare, 0, spare, 0 spare... you knock down 100/100 pins (eventually), and get a score of 100. But if you got say... five strikes to start, and then gutter balls the rest of the way, you'd score 120 having only knocked down 50/100 pins. Baseball, you can be skilled... but if, for example, all 6 of your hits are in the same inning, you'll almost certainly be in much better than than if you made 1 hit in 6 different innings.
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  3. What they're measuring is the skill/luck ratio. Not the total amount of skill required. The ratio. As an example... let's say I had to play Michael Jordan in his prime, no holds barred, one on one for 5 minutes. Who will win? Jordan will win. 100% of the time. And expand this out to non-professionals, and I think it'd still be 100%. Why? Because I, and no other amateur, could stop Jordan. He can score every single time. But let's say I have to play Wayne Gretzky in his prime, against an average NHL goalkeeper. Who will win? Gretzky of course! But... it's no longer 100%. If you ran the simulation against random non-professional people over and over, somewhere, someone would beat him. You see, that goalkeeper is the spoiler. He's good enough to stop most shots. And eventually he's going to have a game where he's really on his game and stops everything... except for one stupid deflection from the novice player. Now, you can look at hockey and say that MORE absolute skill is required because it uses a goalie, and a player usually must beat that goalie to score. And that may be true. But that goalie makes it so much harder to score that it increases the effect of flukes. Own goals and such are embarrassing but usually inconsequential in basketball. But when you're looking at 2-4 made goals an NHL game, compared to 30-50 in the NBA, you can see that the NBA team will tend toward an average score considering how many shots they make, whereas a goalie in the zone can just shut everyone down.
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  4. Okay, I see what you're saying. Most people here were getting on about NHL and NBA... that was the main concern as that is the actual name of the video... they get to the sample size issue with NFL and MLB quite quickly in this video.
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  5. Baseball has threshold scoring. It's not scored by hits, but by runs. A team could scatter 9 doubles throughout a ballgame and lose to a team that got a player to first base on a bad call, bunted, and hit a sacrifice fly. Soccer has almost no scoring. One bad bounce... or frankly, a bad call, could easily decide a game. And shootouts, while requiring skill, are still highly luck based, with the goalie often having to commit pretty hard one way or the other. All that skill and practice and it can come down to that. When you have very little scoring, each point really matters. But when each point really matters... other stuff can start to interfere. Basketball... everyone takes a whole bunch of shots on goal. If it goes in, it's scored. Even if you say... tip in a shot while attempting to get a defensive rebound... a lousy luck sort of play... it's 2 points out of like 80-120. Luck tends to average out a lot more in basketball because any particular #%#$ up is rarely game changing. One bad bounce rarely costs the game.
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  6. There's always luck involved. The reason luck is mitigated more in basketball is because there are more shots on goal in a game, and the odds of any particular shot going in are much higher due to the lack of a goalie. In the modern NBA game, the fewest number of goals is a game has been 19. Free throws and such aside, even in that lowest scoring game, there were 19 goals. Can a ref still interfere with a game with a bad call? Sure, but it's only worth 1 of those 19 goals... so they have to make a bunch of bad calls for it to usually make much difference. If a terrible shot bounces around and goes in, it's one of 19 goals. If you own goal for some reason, it's one of 19 goals. The large number of goals means the luck factor is reduced. You can do something really damned stupid and it's still just 1 goal out of +19. The ball hit a little mound and pick up some spin in soccer/football and the goalie totally wiffs it... that has a very strong possibility of being deciding. It doesn't matter how much skill those players had- the very high percentage of soccer/football games with fewer than 3 goals means one bad bounce or frankly, one bad call, can easily cost a game, all that training be damned.
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  7. LOL... take the names off the sport to get your emotions out of it. In one sport, 30 shots are taken per game... of which about 3 go in. In the other sport, 85 shots are taken per game... of which about 40 go in. It may take more skill to make those 3 shots than to make those 40... it's obviously a much harder shot if only 10% go in! BUT, the slightest change could mean that 3rd potential goal deflects and misses And that could be game deciding since many many games are decided by 1 goal. In the other sport... one goal rarely makes much difference. An own goal in that sport is embarrassing, but it rarely actually makes much difference. Because any single error tends to be smoothed out with many games decided by 5 or more goals. Let's put it another way.... you see those figure skaters or gymnasts right? EXTREMELY skilled... they put undeniably massive amounts of practice in. In order to win at the Olympic level, they pretty much have to do a risky routine which they can't do every time in order to earn enough points. But if they fall, they pretty much lose automatically. So there's luck. They have to do something sooo skilled that it has an inherent failure chance even at their world class level- but since falls are penalized so much, the "best" skater or gymnast could still lose. That's luck.
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  8. What are you getting at? No one said hockey isn't hard. The rules of the game just make it easier for the less skilled team to win. Do you need an example?
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  9. Who knows. Maybe hockey. But whether or not it requires more skill, it does require more luck. Part of the problem is the goalie. Obviously having to beat a goalie requires more skill. BUT, goalies are so skilled that to actually beat a skilled goalie takes what amounts to luck. Sure, a skilled player can beat a goalie more often... but no matter how skilled a player, the great majority of shots fail to beat the goalie. So one ricochet that is too fast for a goalie to physically be able to respond to- a lucky ricochet, can impact a game heavily. In basketball... so many shots are scored that even a handful of fluke scores can get washed out in the score by the end of the game due to the score being, in terms of goals, something like 35-40 by the end of the game.
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