Are days off good or bad?
A study on days off and series outcomes.
Do days off between rounds benefit or hurt teams?
The Study: After the Tampa Bay Lightning swept the Florida Panthers 4-0 in the Second Round of these 2022 NHL Playoffs, they then had a whopping nine days off before facing the New York Rangers in the Eastern Conference Finals. Since the Lightning went on to lose the first two Games against the Rangers, it made us wonder: Is there a correlation between the number of days off between rounds and subsequent series outcomes?
The first group of questions—which were also the most interesting ones to us—that we sought to answer were related to seeing if there is a relationship between days off between series and results in the subsequent series. Here, we’re looking to compare:
a) Each team’s number of days off between series and their subsequent series’ Game One outcome (i.e. Win or Loss of the Game);
b) Each team’s number of days off between series and their subsequent series’ overall outcome (i.e. Win or Loss of the series);
c) Having less or more days off between series in general (i.e. binary) and the subsequent series’ Game One outcome;
d) Having less or more days off between series and the subsequent series’ overall outcome;
e) The differential of days off between teams (i.e. one team’s days off minus the other team’s days off) and their subsequent series’ Game One outcome; and
f) The differential of days off between teams and the subsequent series’ overall outcome.
The second set of questions—which we thought of as a result of the first set of questions— that we thought would be interesting to answer were related to days off and subsequent series’ length. Maybe the number of days off make series closer and, as a result, longer? Anyway, here we compared:
a) Each team’s number of days off between series and the subsequent series’ length; and
b) The combined total days off of the two teams between series and the subsequent series’ length.
Note that the data came from Playoffs between 2013-14 and 2018-19, which included 84 teams across 42 series. While the data set is small, it should nonetheless give us some sort of indication of what relationships exist, if any.
The Results: In each case, the correlation was <0.2, meaning that all relationships were weak. The exact correlation for each question is as follows:
First Questions
a) -0.09
b) -0.02
c) -0.05
d) 0.00
e) -0.12
f) -0.03
Second Questions
a) -0.03
b) -0.04
Discussion: As we’re sure you can gather from the results, it’s pretty clear that there’s essentially no relationship between the number of days off or having less/more days off and the outcome of Game One or the series. Likewise, there isn’t a relationship between days off and a subsequent series’ length. So, if analysts, commentators, and writers talk about the subject as if it’s significant, you can just ignore them.
That being said, if you look closely, there’s actually one important conclusion that can be drawn: More time off is clearly worse for a team. Since the correlation is negative in all cases—where one data point (outcomes; winning Game One or the series) goes down as the other (number of games off) goes up—something can be said of this consistency. Moreover and in particular, having more time off than your competitor appears to hurt your Game One result (see #1. e) at -0.12). Nonetheless, since all correlations are weak, the impact of more time off appears to be minimal.
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