Hearts in Hawai'i
Best Historical Minnesota High School Hockey Programs?
4/25/2023
This is a question either asked my myself or someone else in the old days of the predecessor of the Minnesota High School Hockey forum run by Mitch Hawker. The answer to that question will depend on whom you ask and what criteria the individual uses. Being kind of a numbers geek, I wondered if I could quantify the answer using a number-based system. I started working on this way back in the early days of my website with the understanding that it could never be objective but I wanted to develop something which would pass the "sniff test" with me and people who wouldn't turn a blind eye to a system which didn't favor their favorite team!
When I looked back over the history of Minnesota high school hockey history back to the advent of the state tournament in 1945 (high school hockey had been played in Minnesota well before that), there were three potential problems or factors I needed to respond to and calculate:
1. How should I assign the points and which accomplishments were deserving of receiving points? Obviously, making the state tournament and how a team fared in that tourney in a given year should determine how many points they would receive for that season. On a far lesser scale, I decided to assign points to any team which made at least their section semfinal. If you don't advance at least a section semifinal, you get no points for that season. A nominal value was assigned to reaching that minimal goal, and then additional points would be assigned based on how far a team advanced through the section/region and then state tournament in that season. Each level would add a higher number of points to their season total.
2. Should a team's accomplishments in each decade be worthy of the same point value? In a word, no. Ignoring the obvious that the best teams of the 40's and 50's wouldn't stand much of a chance against the best teams of today, for a number of reasons, there were less teams playing back in the early days. It is easier to win a tournament where you are competing against 30 or 40 teams than it is playing against 140 or 150 teams. There weren't many teams playing way back then, due in large part to an absence of indoor ice sheets. Throughout the 50's and 60's, the number of teams playing was on the rise and the number of teams took another leap when private schools were admitted to the State League starting with the 1974-75 season. From that point until the splitting of teams into two classes, the number stayed relatively static. The split of classes leads to problem #3
3. How to assign points to comparative Class AA and Class A teams? Some have gone so far as to speak of the state Class A tournament as a "JV tournament". This is a harsh description but the underlying meaning isn't lost on nor argued with by me. Statisically, this has been proven--Class AA is better. This doesn't necessarily mean more exciting! Let's not get carried away with what I mean here. The talent level is, by and large, better.
Can this be quantifed? Absolutely and that's where the research I needed to do comes in to play. I did four studies. The first compared how Class AA teams did in head-to-head games against Class A and found that they won 57% of the time from 1997-2020. That percentage is actually lower than it should be when you consider that the average Class AA team is below average for their class while the average Class A team is above average for their class. In other words, the better Class AA teams tended to not play as many games against Class A competition, while the opposite was true for Class A teams.
I looked at head-to-head games between Class AA section winners and Class A section winners using the same 1997-2020 time frame. Class AA teams won 68% of those games. When I compared the PageStat ratings of the top ten Class AA teams to top ten Class A teams in a round-robin type format, PageStat favored the Class AA team 75% of the time. I eventually settled on a factor of 72.9% for Class AA and 27.1% for Class A. So, the point values had to be reduced for teams in both classes starting in 1994, since there were twice as many points being awarded. By ther way, no points were awarded any Tier I teams in 1992 and 1993, for the simple reason that if you played in the Tier I tournament, you were seeded no higher than ninth in your section. Unless you can come up with an example (you can't) of a #9 seed winning their section, the logic is sound of doing this.
With the adjustments for era played and class played in post-1993 determined to what was obviously a subjective but what I thought was fair amount, it was time to plug the numbers. And the #1 team in history was determined--Edina. No surprise there as they had the most state titles and the most trips to state of any team, even when separating Edina East from Edina (the State League does this, so I did also). And the difference between them and the next best, Hill-Murray, isn't close. Edina garnered 20% more points than the Pioneers.
If you care to dig into the numbers and the results, check this page out. It has the grand totals of the top 75 teams and there are also pages where the results are broken down by decade. Are the results perfect? Nope, they can't be. Am I satisfied with the results? Mostly, yes. A few teams ended up in a far different position than I thought they should be, but that is mostly just personal bias.
Previous: 4/23/2023--Is Hawaii a Thing of the Past for Us?
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