Tin Can Alley

Reading the commissioner's unnecessarily mean power rankings from this past week (hey, he is my friend, what am I supposed to expect? Friends are mean to each other, right?), I noticed that he said that his team had hit a string of tough week with teams putting up their best numbers against him.  This got me thinking about how a team can really put up great numbers against one team one week, and then stink up the joint the next.  I had previously tabulated the totals of all of a team's opponents and then ranked which team had come up against the greatest cumulative buzzsaw (Omar's opponents had been the toughest in total, followed by the Peachz and FuE, with Andrus' team facing the easiest competition, followed by the Ackbars and Woo Woo).  This week, however, I came up with the list of which team has put up the best numbers in the league in a given week, which team was their opponent, and against which team teams put up their best number.  The results are given below (Click here to go right to the spreadsheet and look at the raw data yourself.  Make sure to check out the tabs). 



The first column, "Best of the Week" shows how many times a given team has put up the best totals for any given week.  As you can see, the Ackbars have put up the highest numbers in a week 19 times, many of those coming in the "Steals" and "Saves" categories.  Conversely, the ICU has only put up the best numbers of the week 5 times.  Given the injury history, this should hardly be surprising as the team has not yet started to fire on all cylinders.  It is interesting to note, though, that despite never killing a given week, this team is still in contention, showing that you don't need to be the best during the regular season, just good enough to beat your opponent.  Most surprising to me was the fact that the Fooeys and the Matsuis have put up the best numbers in a week 9 times each, but yet remain in the cellar in the overall standings.  Perhaps there is a good explanation for this...
The second column of the data, the "Unluckiest of the Week" shows how many times a team has been facing a team that puts up the best numbers for that given week.  For example, there have been 14 times when the Bernabes' opponents have put up the best numbers of the week in a given category, and 12 times when the Fooeys's opponents have dominated the week.  Bernabe's numbers are only slightly ahead of the rest of the field, though it seems that the sight of their unis send their opponents into the white hot rage of a thousand suns.  Conversely, the underperforming Andrus's (AKA the Lack of Moraleses) have gotten pretty lucky in that their opponents have only put up week-dominating numbers 6 times. 
The third column, the "Punching Bag" column shows how many times an opponent's team has put up their best numbers of the season against them.  For example, the Car Wash (or Super Upton Brothers, as they are known these days) has been the subject of opponents putting up their career best numbers in a given category 19 times.  The difference between this listing and the previous one is that this listing measures when an opponent puts up the best numbers of his career, while the previous one only measures when an opponent puts up the best numbers in the week.  Because there are 12 categories and 10 teams, there are 120 chances that a team can put up their best numbers against you, while there have only been 8 weeks with 12 categories, leaving 96 chances to be the subject of a team mauling you by putting up the best numbers of the week.  The bottom line from this analysis is that the Car Wash's opponents have been the strongest against him, and that the Woo Woo's opponents have not been particularly strong against him.