On DH.N’s Stupid Stat of the Day

I started posting a “Stupid Stat of the Day” for each Red Wings game to social media at the start of the 2019-2020 season. It was an irregular feature on the site (or the site’s social media feed) before that, going back to 2013.

The SSOTD has gotten a bit more of a reaction early this season so I wanted to take advantage of the two-day break between Red Wings games to note a few things about it.

I call them “Stupid Stat of the Day” because it sounds better than “Frivolous Stat of the Day.” And they are frivolous. I’m well aware that these stats have absolutely no relevance to the current Red Wings team or their chances in any particular game. There are a lot of places to get serious analysis on a day-to-day basis. I don’t write analysis pieces that regularly; instead I fill the gap with something (I consider) a little more fun.

Any time I run an “unbeaten” or “winless” SSOTD, the conditions will have been met at least once. I’d consider it cheating to say something like “the Red Wings are unbeaten all-time against the Seattle Kraken in games played at home on a Sunday” if it had never happened.

That said, I’ve made mistakes before. I’ve got a database of all of the Red Wings’ past games, which I use to look for these curiosities. There have been times where I’ve messed up my database query and ran with incorrect data. In those cases, I update the associated post on DH.N to note as such.

Starting this season, I’ve been “showing my work” in those blog posts. For example, while the social media posts for last week’s game against the Florida Panthers noted that the Red Wings were unbeaten against Florida in games played on Wednesday in the month of October, the post here on the site additionally noted that it had only happened once before, on October 28, 1998.

And, finally, while it should be painfully obvious (see the note on frivolity above), none of these are intended to be predictions. It is really, really weird that the first six SSOTDs of this season have all been of the “unbeaten/winless” variety and the streak has held for each of them. I kind of want to keep going with “unbeaten” stats and see how long it’ll go but, as of writing this, I haven’t looked into an SSOTD for Wednesday’s game in Buffalo so we’ll see if any interesting numbers come up.