Is The East Really THAT Bad?

During the early Hockey Night in Canada game last night, as the Chicago Blackhawks were completely outclassing the Toronto Maple Leafs, Play-by-play man Jim Hughson, dropped a fairly interesting statistic on air. Teams from the Western Conference are 56 games above .500 when playing against teams from the Eastern Conference. While this was interesting, and did confirm my gut feeling that top to bottom, teams in the West are just better than teams from the East, I thought it would be interesting to see just how meaningful this number actually was.

NHL.com has this information available, so a quick dump into excel and I was able to quickly confirm that even after yesterdays games, the West is still 56 games above .500 versus the East, posting a record of 131-75-31, good for 293 points out of a possible 474, which is a 61.8% points percentage. When matched up against other Western opponents, West teams are 373-293-80, 826 points from a possible 1492, good for a 55.4% points percentage. Quickly looking the other way the East is 7 games above .500 versus the West (you have to love the NHL's absurd point system), with a record of 106-99-32, 244 of 474 points, and a 51.5% points percentage. Within the East, teams are 372-287-85, giving 829 points and a 55.7% point percentage. This difference is good for about 30 points, or one extra win per team in the West relative to teams in the East.

Here is all the data pulled together:

When framed in that manner, it may seem that the difference is not that significant. Of the 237 inter-conference games, only 15 of them (6.4%) would have to have gone the other way for the leagues to be seen as even on this means of comparison. The question becomes, what is the probability of the West teams winning at the high rate that they do, assuming the conferences are actually even? Phrased another way, can the discrepancy be explained by luck?

Fortunately, math allows us to easily answer this question; however, the convoluted point system does complicate this a little bit. Both methods I tried suggest that the West is in fact significantly stronger this year. To summarize, the chances of the West getting 293 (or more) of 474 points assuming the conferences were equal strong (they should average .558 point percentage) works out to 0.46%. The chances of the west winning 131 (or more) games out of the 237, (assuming equal strength, they should win 119) is larger at 5.6%. Even still, we can say with some confidence that the Western Conference is stronger than the East this year.