Words For A Loss

One pet peeve I have with the National Hockey League is the way they record team won/loss records. Or, as they put it, won/loss/overtime-loss records. Winning in overtime gets you the full two points, so they're listed with ordinary wins with no distinction. But overtime losses get you a point, so they're listed in a separate column, after the regulation losses, where they used to record the ties.

The problem is, what constitutes a winning record? In sports life baseball and basketball that have only wins and losses, you just look at those two numbers and see which one is bigger. Our in sports like football and soccer, they have ordinary tires that you can just ignore as neutral, and compare the W and L columns.

But in the NHL, it's not as clear. Say a team has a record of 6-5-3. Do they have a winning record? They have more wins than regulation losses. But they have more total losses than wins. But they have 15 points from 14 games, so they have more than a point a game in a league where they give two points for a win. But that's not really true when they sometimes give out more than two points in a game.

The problem is, it can really warp people's expectations. Last week, I checked the standings, and there were only four teams out of thirty that had losing records, with only five more at even records. And I've heard players brush off bad seasons by saying the team is at .500 when they're really having losing seasons. No, I don't know how you fix it. Or maybe we want it this way. After all, this is the league that once had 16 of 21 teams make the playoffs; if we can't give every team hope to make the playoffs, at least let them mask how bad they really are.