OOTP Mythbusters #1: What's luck got to do with it?

[Young Drachma]

OOTP Mythbusters: What’s luck got to do with it?

an interesting comparison would be to see how your VOCL maps out vs the Pyth. Record. One compares based on a grouping of player’s perceived performance over the league average while the other bases upon a team’s perceived performance over the league average. I wonder if the two would map out parallel or not, and if one would provide more insight to teams that played over their head.

So today’s Mythbusters question is: Does pythagoraen record correlate with VOCL?

First off, here's a definition of VOCL for those who don't know.

I decided to do a three-year study of a league to see if this was indeed something that could be correlated or not.

The Pythagorean expectation effectively tries to measure how lucky/unlucky a team has been in a year. VOCL has no interest in luck. It measures player performance over a year to determine whether the team has the “right stuff” to be the best in the league. It evaluates this — with the new formula — based on the relative strength of the league, ensuring its accuracy across the leagues.

Looking that the chart above, we see there is no correlation between expected record and VOCL. Some years, the teams at the top get “luckier” and some years, they are unlucky. One reason for the lack of correlation, is because VOCL doesn’t try to do as much as expected record does. VOCL simply says “once you reach a positive VOCL, you are championship level and thus, it’s not impossible for you to make the playoffs.”

That’s it. It doesn’t assume the winner and it means nothing if a team that has a VOCL well over 100, gets trumped by one with half that for a playoff spot. VOCL isn’t judging teams based on measures other than relatively performance by your players, coupled by performance on the field to really let you know whether you are a “pretender” or a contender. It allows you to “ignore the standings” if you’re a team that has a mysteriously magical season and finished just out of first place.

One good example of this is Quad City in 1973. We finished just 2.5 games out of the first place tie that occurred that year. Our VOCL was just a mere 5.6 and we played above our heads. I suppose if you looked just at expected record, you’d be able to say “well gee, we really played above our heads. We aren’t that good.” But I knew that team was rebuilding and it was part of the rebuilding process that we’d reached that apex of being competitive for an entire season.

VOCL told me “you’re on the right track. Keep building, you’re not done yet.” Expected record told us “you were way better than you were supposed to. You’re not there yet.”

It’s not the same message though and the real issue here is, it’s not a consistent message. Teams at the top of the standings aren’t given any indication of truly “where they stand” other than looking at the standings and seeing where they finished at the end of the year, in relation to their peers. In that way, expected record gives them nothing to go on.

VOCL, on the other hand, gives them a lot to work with. You can compare VOCLs from year to year to get a snapshot of how competitive your team is. Not just in relation to the rest of the league, but to yourselves. And you can detatch yourself from the standings or a fluke year, to really evaluate/measure what sort of things you need to do to your team to improve it or tweak it further.

So to answer the question: Does pythagoraen record correlate with VOCL?

The answer is MYTH.