DON'T GET UPSET, BUT IT'S NOT A CINDERELLA STORY

Study shows the "miracle" run isn't quite what it seems...

The Edmonton Oilers' playoff run have been enjoyable to watch, but the upset angle can pretty much be thrown out the window.

I know. I'm not going to convince you that the Oilers are anything less than a "miracle" team. The talking heads have said so, the local press has written it, everyone believes it, so it must be true.

Don't get me wrong. Entertaining as the Oilers have been, and as much as this has been fuelled by players -- Fernando Pisani, Ales (Pinto) Hemsky, et al. -- who are playing far above their heads -- it isn't a miracle. It's simply Edmonton playing well after having had the deck stacked against them in the regular season.

That's at least if you subscribe to theory put forward by Tom Benjamin, who points out what we all know: the NHL regular season isn't a fair fight. Western teams are more spread out geographically; consequently they travel farther to and from games. The result is there are nights where they are simply too travel-whipped to have much of a chance of winning.

Here's Benjamin:

"... one of the studies I did matched the travel disadvantaged teams with a travel advantaged team from the East and compared their records from the time they entered the league. Los Angeles matched up with Philly, Vancouver with Buffalo, Edmonton with Hartford and so on.

"The result? The travel disadvantaged teams got pasted in the regular season. It wasn't even close. The Eastern teams were well above .500 in the regular season and the Western ones were well below. The Western teams didn't make the playoffs nearly as often as their Eastern counterpart and when they did they were seeded lower. Still, the Western teams actually did slightly better in the playoffs - when they made it - than the teams in the East.

"It has been ten years since I did the travel studies, but I don't think much has changed. If there is a little more geographic balance it is offset by increased parity. This is an obvious explanation for the number of playoff upsets we have seen in the West over the years. The top seed is usually a travel advantaged team and the bottom seed is frequently a team that lost a dozen points to the schedule.

"Thus the regular season gap in points is often an illusion. The upsets weren't really upsets."

You have to wonder if the standings aren't even more distorted now since the league schedules more divisional games. Boy, do I look stupid now for writing before the start of Round 2 that there had to be some reason that a No. 8 seed had never reached the conference final since the NHL went to its current playoff format in 1993-94.

Now the 29-point gap in the regular season between the Oilers and the Red Wings -- who fit the profile of a travel-advantaged team -- shrinks. It's safe to assume all that extra travel cost the Oilers a dozen points, as Benjamin says. So instead of being a 95-point club, you can bump the Oilers up to 107.

Meantime, the Red Wings (27-10-3 against Pacific and Northwest teams) probably scored some easy wins against tired, tired teams in addition to getting a steady diet of the "B Teams" -- the Blackhawks, Blues and Blue Jackets.

Saying those two factors were worth an extra 15 or 20 points to Detroit seems like a conservative estimate. That would knock the Red Wings down into the 105-to-110-point range -- exactly where the Oilers might have been if not for all that extra travel.

The NHL won't redress this, since it's run by lawyers in New York City who might have a hard time finding Edmonton on a map. But it should open everyone else's eyes.

What's really interesting is Benjamin's justification for why he abandoned the exercise:

"...hockey fans were not prepared to accept that geography made a mockery of the
standings in the West. Even on the left coast, fans preferred to believe that
their team were a bunch of underachievers."

In a similar vein, we'd all like to believe the Oilers are the Little Team That Could. And in some ways -- being the smallest Canadian city in the league, having had few players with Stanley Cup experience, etc., -- the Oilers are that team. This is just one way that they aren't.

OTHER BUSINESS

• Jays-Rays: after the Rocky Mountain Low, Toronto needs a sweep this week, what with the Chisox and Bosox coming in next. Roy Halladay should get it done against Mark Hendrickson tonight; then it's Josh Towers-Casey Fossum Wednesday. Seriously, how many more chances is Towers going to get? Even if he beats the Devil Rays, it's nothing to be proud of; he beat them for his only win so far this season.
• The Kingston arena shuffle: Olympia & York/SMG Canada has the inside track on winning the bid. Whether or not it's going to happen is anyone's guess. This is Kingston -- after the 2003 election, the current mayor promised there would be shovels in the ground by the end of his term. Now it's an election year and still, nothing. I won't back off from last Saturday's howling at the moon, but let's just say that the terminal do-gooders have raised a number of good points. But so what? He who pays the piper calls the tune. If the downtown-business community wants the arena to be built downtown, then it probably will go downtown. You're fighting the good fight there, but so be it. End of story.

That's all for now. Give it up for the Weakerthans.