Shanny on the Weekend

Before I write this, I have to make one thing perfectly clear. Brian Shanahan is a good guy. He does great things for the sport of lacrosse, has a good knowledge of the players in all levels of the game, and was great to listen to when the Rock televised their road games way the hell back when. But I have read his columns on NLL Insider this year, and a lot of them don't follow any logic, or have any structure. Here is his an example of some that in his latest column after this weekend's games.

"Wow. Again, another surprising weekend. Chicago beats Minnesota – not a huge surprise – but you have to like Chicago’s 10 goal run after a slow start."

This is Brian Shahahan, the guy is THE lacrosse analyst in North America. The guy that gets to analyze NLL championship games, Minto Cups, and just about every other major lacrosse game or tournament shown on TV. There are a few major flaws with this collection of sentences and sentence fragments. He first says that it was a surprising weekend. This is fair, because it was. The statistical data favoured San Jose and Minnesota in particular. They both lost, so yes, it was in fact surprising. However, following that he says that it wasn't a huge surprise that Chicago beat Minnesota. Didn't he say that it was surprising right before that? I guess he means it was surprising, but not hugely surprising. It was surprising Mr. Shanahan, you said that right before you said it wasn't huge surprise. Don't go back and forth.

"It doesn’t look like the Power Rankings have changed much but try to use your imagination to picture this. A month ago the distance between number 1 and 12 was huge – you would have to scroll down your computer a long way to go from Philadelphia to Chicago. Today the distance between 1 and 12 is much smaller. If we could we would squish them on your computer screen today."

Now this is great. Try to follow this. He says that the distance between the 1st and 12th team in the NLL was huge. It was in terms of their record, with Philadelphia being 6-0 and Edmonton being 0-6 or something similar. But then he says that the distance on my computer screen was longer back then than it is now. I am pretty damn sure it is the same distance. The exact same formula for how to format his rankings have been used every week. The teams are listed by his magical ranking system, with their logo and a small blip of information surrounding them. This hasn't changed since January. The distance today on my computer screen isn't smaller. The only thing that has changed is that the winning percentage differential is much smaller from first to last (or in Shanny's case, the weird, sometimes head scratching logic used to rank teams has somehow mysteriously pushed the teams closer together). But somehow, I need to scroll a smaller distance down my computer to get from 1 to 12. That is why the standings are much tighter. It is because my computer screen has tightened up. Good logic Shanny!