Ga-wha?

Despite that I never like picking teams that have played seven games against teams that won in a sweep, I would totally have called Hershey vs. WBS (or Hershey vs. Bridgeport) a tossup, just like BPT-WBS was.

So this all, from afar, amazes me. Almost confounds me.

Hershey leads 3-0. Wow.

Meantime across the pond, the US won again, as did Finland over Latvia. The Americans and the Canadians meet Tuesday for first place in the pool. (Tie goes to Canada on goal differential.) There’s also a feature on the site about Sean Bergenheim, headlined “Finland’s Bergenheim finally burying his chances.” Bad timing alert: Bergenheim had no shots today. Oh well. I was momentarily impressed that the writer — no byline — had gotten hold of Dave Baseggio. Then I read the quote, which seemed awfully familiar. With good reason… it’s Dave’s quote in my story from Feb. 22, the night Sean scored four goals against Hartford. Cool…

Edit on second thought, re HER-WBS… why not go back to what I was thinking before Game 3 at Bridgeport?* Flip the coin three times. One out of four times, it’ll come up the same way all three times; one of eight times, it’ll be all tails.

Or, let’s even use some fake math. Take WBS’s and Hershey’s overall home and road records and turn them into one number: Hershey should win about .428 of the time at Wachovia, and about .522 of the time at Giant Center**. The Bears win the first two on the road about .183 of the time (.428x.428); they take the first three about 9.6 percent of the time (.428x.428x.522=.0956).

The math might be fake, but assuming they’re relatively evenly matched — sometimes, even if not — someone’s gonna sweep by accident sometimes. The good news for the Penguins? They’ll win the next four games by accident about 7.4 percent of the time.

(That it’s happening in Houston-Milwaukee too? That’s just weird.)

*-Pre-concussion, dontcha know. Took me a while to remember. 🙂
**-The big difference is the road record; the Pens’ was notably better than the Bears’.

Michael Fornabaio