Oh, yeah, incidentally great work on the writeup. I miss being able to do that like I used to do a few years back.
Some quick thoughts from me:
1. If you sort the teams from highest shooting percentage allowed to the lowest, you'll come up with a list very similar to your rankings. The reason for that is that you're intelligent and that defense is highly correlated with winning. I imagine if buzzermanager had the ability to exclude obviously thrown games it would be an even tighter fit.
2. If you sort the teams by top five salaries, the four highest paid top fives are all in the Great 8. Of those four, one is very likely to miss the playoffs, another is on pace to squeak in, and then the other two are solidly in. Keep this in mind while I point out...
3. If you sort the teams by the salaries paid for their top 6-10 players, the four highest totals are your Big 8 playoff teams. The moral of the story is that spending a lot of salary on a few very good players can be pretty successful or not, while spending enough salary to have a solid ten deep (or close to it) roster is usually very successful.
4. If we were using the NHL style playoff seeding, GS would be hosting Milwaukee in the first round. I don't actually remember if the division champion would automatically get home ice even if the second wild card had a better record, but in this case GS would have it anyhow on the points scored tiebreaker, since they're tied on record and point differential. Pretty nifty, that.
5. Checking the advanced stats, I'm contesting 67% of my shots and allowing a minuscule 67 points per 100 shots. Maybe that's why I haven't given up 900 points yet on the season and the rest of you slappies are over 1000 points allowed.
