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***boom*** · 07-17-2023, 10:59 PM

[718 words, ready for grading]

Since the SHL's move to FHM in Season 53, the teams of the league have played 19 full seasons, and along the way we've had some incredibly stacked divisions as well as some howlers. One of the latter was the Pacific last season, but I was curious how each division performed in the aggregate in the combined 76 division-seasons since then. In this article, I added up the total records for every division in every season since the shift to FHM. The seasons are displayed in a chart below:

[Image: 3kQ5W6U.png]

The Best

There is clearly no contest here, as anyone who was around the league in this time will immediately know. The best division of all time by a country mile is the late-50s Great Lakes, becoming the only division since the move to FHM to ever post a single-season combined points percentage over 62%, and they did it five times. First is the Season 59 bunch that got 77.4% of available points, followed by S57 with 74.2%, then S58 with 71.8%, then S56 with 68.3%, and finally S54 with 64.5%. The three-year span of 66-game seasons between S57-59 produced seven 100-point seasons out of this division.

The best of the rest is led by the immediate continuation of this division in the S60 and S61 Northeast teams, but the Season 54 Southwest Division gang of Los Angeles, Texas, New Orleans and San Francisco is the best-ever record from outside the Northeast, with all four teams posting winning seasons in the 50-game slate.

The Worst

It's probably not surprising that the list of worst-ever division performances is led by the Atlantic Division in the late 50s. Not only did they have multiple rebuilding teams in Tampa and Baltimore and an expansion Atlanta, but they had to play against the Great Lakes more than any other non-divisional opponent and got pummeled for it. The Season 54* and 59 Atlantic Division groups are the only ones who failed to collectively crack the 40% barrier, as they occupy six of the eight worst FHM collective division performances.

*Season 54 is notable because Tampa literally managed to yank the performance of a bog-standard division - Manhattan, New England and Baltimore - down a full 12% by themselves by going 0-50, making an otherwise unremarkable performance into the second-worst. This one can therefore probably be excused, as the rest of the division was fine without them. This was also the only time a Western Conference division has ever gotten over .600 in a season, and this is probably why.

The very worst performance therefore has to go to the Season 59 Atlantic Division. To sum it up, a 25-win Atlanta Inferno team got a first-round bye by winning their division. Some of these other divisions had one really good team propping up their performance, but the teams in this division couldn't even consistently defeat each other. As far as I can tell, this is the only time in the FHM era that a team has ever won their division with a losing record, and it is unlikely to be duplicated anytime soon.

Outside of the poor Atlantic, the worst eras are marked by the Season 64 and 65 Northeast Divisions that saw Hamilton, Montreal, New England (and for one bizarre season, Toronto) all plod along, the late-50s Southwest with the twin rebuilds of San Francisco and New Orleans, and in 11th place (10th if 0-50 is stricken) the glorious mayhem of the S71 Pacific Division, with a 44-win campaign by Edmonton the only thing keeping them from the bottom.

Finally, we can look at the divisions' aggregate performance over time.

[Image: yFeTr2Q.png]

Although the teams in the divisions themselves have changed membership, I opted to consider the North East the continuation of the Great Lakes and the Pacific the continuation of the Northwest, since both of those old divisions contributed three teams to the new ones. We can see that the Atlantic's fortunes in the 50s were pretty much inverse to those of the Great Lakes, while the West has remained much more stable over time. The Atlantic and Pacific divisions got their time in the sun in the mid-60s, but both are now in a race back to the basement. Looking ahead, it'll be interesting to see where these lines go over time.

Raw Data

***Citizen of Adraa*** · 07-18-2023, 07:40 AM

yeah I still remember S59 Atlantic, when MAN started tanking, and no one else was yet ready to compete :D that was a very, very weird division

***Wally*** · 07-18-2023, 09:55 AM

@Carpy48 How do we feel about this one?

grok · 07-18-2023, 11:29 AM

for new players, it's near impossible to overstate how dominant the early FHM great lakes division was. in s58 through s60, all four great lakes teams were in the top 6 league-wide, and only three of them made the playoffs each season. for over a calendar year (close to two) the playoffs scene was basically "the three best great lakes teams, whichever of BAP/TEX is good enough, and eight teams playing for pride."