Remaining schedule not helpful in Flyers’ playoff chase

Tyler Dellow published an interesting look yesterday at the impact of scheduling on a team’s results. Here are the key points:

1. The home team has an advantage even when the teams are equally rested, winning about 54.6% of the games.
2. The home team gets an even bigger advantage because it’s much more common for them to have more rest than the visiting team (34% of the time) than the other way around (19.5%).
3. Rest and home-ice advantage combine in about the way you’d expect:

So getting more rest than your opponent is good, and playing at home is good, and the road team usually doesn’t get more rest than the home team. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the Flyers’ remaining schedule, and what it means for the expected winning percentage if the two teams are equal:

Overall, before you even look at how good the teams are, the Flyers’ expected winning percentage is .491.

They never get an opponent playing the second game of a back-to-back. Even though the home team is almost twice as likely to have more rest, they’re at a rest disadvantage in two of their home games — including a brutal one against the Rangers that more than wipes out their home ice advantage.

The Flyers haven’t done themselves any favors on the ice through the first 3/4 of the season, and the schedule isn’t helping them out as they try to dig themselves out of this hole.