Standings question

I feel like a moron, I should know this.
I have to figure up the standings for our minor league basketball team in my coverage area and I'm trying to figure up when they will lock up a playoff spot.
What is the easiest way, or better yet, the right way, to figure up if a team has sealed up a playoff spot?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_(sports)

This what you are looking for?

Doe sthis league have any type of SID office?

 

How many teams make the playoffs? For the purposes of being eliminated, use that place (four teams - fourth place) to calculate the magic number. If a team can no longer reach fourth place, it can't make the playoffs.

For the purposes of clinching, look at your team and the fifth place team. If the fifth-place team cannot catch your team, then your team is guaranteed to be in the top four and is in the playoffs.

Hope that helps

 

That helps a lot. And no, this league doesn't have a true PR department. I have been doing the standings by hand all season. Oh, for the days of the old CBA and the AP putting those standings out there.

 

This will be interesting this season if it should happen: The junior college conference has switched from home-and-home doubleheaders spread out over the week (usually Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday) to a four-game, two-doubleheader weekend series. The catch is this: If the Saturday and/or Sunday games were postponed by weather the series must be completed by Tuesday. If not, the games that were not played will go on the record as forfeits for both teams.

No, really.

Now around here, we've had a hell of a time getting through the schedule the past three to four years because it seems to rain five days a week.

Somewhere, somehow, I can see a pair of teams (or two or three pairs) getting hosed over at the end of the season because they couldn't get games made up and were both stuck with forfeits. If they tie for a playoff spot but they're officially both 0-4 against each other, the bitching will be off the charts. And it will be worse if multiple ties can't be broken because multiple teams are 0-4 against each other.

It'll be interesting. I want it to happen because I want to see if the conference will really be that dickish.

 

To be able to do this with 100 percent accuracy, you also need to know the league's tiebreaking procedures.

 

In every sport, it's very simple:
1) Compare the teams in the tie. If it's a two-way tie, the winner of the season series advances. If it's three or more, the best record among the tied against the others advances.
2) If they are still tied, go to the top of the standings and compared tied teams versus the No. 1 team. If still tied, compare versus No. 2 team, and so on down to the bottom of the standings.
3) Coin toss.

This year in women's basketball, the team I cover and another team tied for the same seed in the post season tournament. They had tied their season series, been swept by all the teams above them and swept the two below them, so it went to a coin toss.

Baseball could be fun to break because instead of teams being tied in the their season series 2-2, they could be tied 1-3 or 0-4 (1-3 would be a Monday split and Tuesday double forfeits; 0-4 would be two double forfeits).

I'm thinking they'll have to add a step between 2 and 3 to be fair in the tie-breakers: Record in games played between tied teams. Team A going 2-2 in a four-game series in which all four games were actually played is different than Team A going 2-2 in a four-game series in which they won the two games played and had to forfeit the other two because of this dumb rule.

I think the conference is trying to avoid a log jam of make-up games at the end of the season. They'll get that but they could also have 19 pissed-off baseball coaches. Like I said, though, I want this to happen just because I want to see how badly it'll be handled.

 

Wish it was.

Some sports have divisions within conferences within leagues.

Tiebreakers can go down to best record within division, then within conference, then against common opponents, etc.

 

Then the bastards will flip a coin.

 

In this juco conference, there's no league play between divisions. The west has 9 teams and the east has 10. This year, one team in the west is playing at the Division II level in baseball (everyone else is division I), so their games won't count in tie-breakers. Which makes things interesting for that team. They don't care if they don't make up their conference games because those games have nothing to do with seeding for their post-season tournament. They'll be playing the two other Division II teams, which are both independent.

But, yeah, in each sport, the tie-breaker is just those three steps because inter-division games don't count in any sport. They don't even use overall record as a criteria (which wouldn't have helped in the basketball tie I mentioned earlier anyway, because those teams even had the same overall record of 9-21).

It's easy to break ties in football because each team plays the other only once. But in the other sports, where teams play each other 2 to 4 times, it gets messy. One year, the women's basketball team I covered finished in a tie for last place with one other team. The top 8 went to the playoffs in a (then) 9-team division. They had only beaten each other. The conference didn't want to have a coin toss decide the qualifier, so they made them hold a play-in game. The team I covered took a 300-mile trip on Monday, beat the team they were tied with, then got right in the vans and drove halfway to their next game that night. The next morning, they finished off the rest of those 400-or-so miles and lost to the No. 1 seed.

 

I think what everyone here is saying is ... you'll know when the playoffs start.

 

You don't want to overlook the fact that teams competing for spots above your team may play each other, too.