So, I did this before the Chicago Blackhawks vs.Vancouver Canucks Western Conference Semi-Final Series. Now the Men of Four Feathers have moved on to bigger and better things, actually playing for something shiny which shall not be touched or named in the Western Conference Finals vs the San Jose Sharks.

Last time around the numbers, my personal killing time between series computer, came up with showed the Hawks had a 54.8% chance of winning the series, and most likely in 6 games, with no shutouts in the series. This I find kinda cool, but what I think is better is where it missed. It called the Hawks winning 2 of the first 3 at the UC, and splitting the first 2 in Vancouver. Why is this good you may ask? Because this time around my random pull some numbers from you backside generating machine has the Blackhawks winning 55.5% of the time, slightly better than against the Canucks (54.8%).

A quick recap of last series numbers and predictions!

• 54.8% Hawks win = Check
• Hawks in 6 Games = Check
• No Shutouts = Check
• Controlling Home ice is key! = CHECK CHECK CHECK (hahahahaha VAN 0-3 at home!) Hawks miss
• CHI GFA 3.16 = 3.83 actual = Off
• CHI GAA 3.09 = 3.00 actual = Check
• CHI wins 2/3 home game = 1/3 actual = Off
• CHI wins 1/2 (first 2 road games) = 2/2 actual = Off
• Predicted 1 OT game = 0 actual = Off
• Hawks had a 0.113 chance of winning series with 1 Home win = Off
• Hawks had a 0.937 chance of winning series with 3 Road wins = Check
• If the Hawks lose game one, the odds of the Hawks winning the series drop to 0.403 = Off

The Hawks scored better than predicted by over a half a goal a game, but held Vancouver to the mean. Controlling Home Ice was key, the Hawks went on 1 for 3 not good, but with Vancouver mistakenly playing in Edmonton for their three home games, their lack of controlling home ice gave the Hawks the series.

No shutouts occurred as predicted, though LU came close with two 1 GA games. Chicago had the better odds of a shutout by nearly a 2:1 margin at 0.061 to 0.036 chance.

After game 1, had the Hawks won their chances would have nearly increased by 20% to 73.6% chance of winning the series. But they did loose, but saw their chances drop to 40.3% a 14 point drop which they overcame. So keep this in mind of over coming the odds!

So I did the same basic method I did last time, with a few adjustments. Before the Vancouver series the Hawks and Canucks had only played 6 postseason games each, not really a viable sample to factor in. But now the Hawks have played 12 playoff games and the Sharks 11, enough to at least factor them.

I did this by weighing the regular season stats and playoff stats. Quick idea is I multipled the regular season stats by 41 for Home and Road break downs, and 82 for season only, and also multiplied playoff stats by 5, 6 or 12 depending on Home/Road/Total requirement, than dived this number by total games (46, 47, 93, 94) to get the team aggregate.

This time around I also weighed Home Ice by 5/3 over the visiting team(though the Hawks road record has been much better than at the UC). Just like last time I determined from these, the percentage of the time a team scored a certain amount of goals, and an aggregate of OT/Scores First performance.

These are not stats I generated, but are based off of stats, simulating a best of seven series 11,000 times. What this does is generate not a statistical wrought comparison of G/G vs G/G season stats, but gives a range overall of how often it these numbers happen, and gives a reasonable bracket of what happens more often.

So here we go again!

The Average series is 5.83 games, same as vs VAN.

Goals For per game

Games Series won in

Home, Road and Overall win %

9694 OT games played, 0.881 per series. CHI wins 0.586 to SJS 0.483

Number of Games scoring Number of Goals

0.982shutouts per series (10801 total in 64079 games)

San Jose was shutout 9307 times or 0.846 times per series

Chicago was shutout 1494 times or 0.136 times per series.

Number of Times 4, 5, 6, and 7 game series occurred

Final Goal Count

So what to make of all of this.

First the series is going to be VERY VERY tight! The Overall win percentage is 0.530 : 0.470 in favor of the Hawks. This is within the standard deviation (>75% of results fell within) which was about 3-4%.

With seeing how the Hawks played on the Road vs Vancouver and the Nashville Predators, controlling home ice for both sides is huge, again but when is it not?

The way the numbers came out in GF/G is pretty surprising. I checked the formulas and math numerous times, but this is how they came out. To me this shows that both teams defense's are strong, and which ever team plays soundly in this series probably has the ability control, unless both do than it is back to square 1.

For this set, I will be fairly surprised if they are even close to be as good as my first set was vs the Canucks, but then again not so much shocked if they a fairly accurate. This is a very hard series to read. I had a feeling the Hawks would beat VAN in 6, maybe 7. This series, I have a feeling again, but not nearly as strong, and I realy do not want to piss off the Hockey Gods, so I will keep it to myself again until after the series is over.

So here is what the numbers say this time around.

• Antti-Goal Niemi has a decent chance of showing up at least once. (0.846), but Nabby will have a hard time matching Niemi's Finnish of a shutout (0.136)
• Score like 3-2, 4-1, 3-1 will be common. (~4 goals game Average)
• We may see one overtime game (0.881 per series)
• The Hawks should win 2 or 3 of their Home games (0.637 win % at the UC)
• The Series will last 6 games again (5.83 AVG)with the Hawks winning 1-2 in San Jose finishing the Sharks off.

Well these are the Numbers for the 2010 Western Conference Finals. I will probably add a few more here tomorrow, but at least wanted to get this up tonight.

Anything you would like to see, leave a comment.

GO HAWKS!!