jramification

Fuck the Flyers.

Wrote this on a whim in a comment on r/hockey, figured some might enjoy it here.

"The Man in the Shadows"

Following the first period of game 6 of the 2017 Stanley Cup Finals, a disgruntled Gary Bettman steams in his luxury box at Bridgestone Arena. Unhappy with the direction of the period of hockey he has just witnessed, he decides to take a walk. Disguised in a trench coat and large cowboy hat, he casually but briskly walks down to the referees' room. Hearing a stern knock on the door, NHL referee Kevin Pollock gets up and after a brief moment of hesitation, nervously lets the mysterious man in the room.

"Things are not always as they seem," says the dark figure in the doorway

The Tampa Bay Lightning! Probably, maybe, nobody knows.

So I was thinking the other day, if we could clone people, that would be pretty awesome (or probably eventually terrible) for sports, right? So I decided to look into it, using Own the Puck's Lineup Creator tool, which uses possession metrics to predict the theoretical success of any combination of players. The results can be found here:

https://docs.google.com/a/oswego.edu/spreadsheets/d/1WMNHkGRkcI9qifd5k9xLP33PKKMWo03FwdwsDKy6uk8/edit?usp=sharing

What this spreadsheet contains is a hypothetical situation where each NHL team was allowed to choose one forward and one