East vs West Part II : The Bloodening

So a while ago I did a post on comparing the Eastern Conference vs the West and almost instantly regretted it. The two problems were that I used all the data, not just intra conference data, so it included stuff like west vs west and east vs east and... okay, well, just those two things. But that's more than enough to "smooth out" the apparent differences. The second was I used points per game, which is probably not correct, since who's to say a win should be worth 3 points instead of 2, or 4, or 10, or whatever. So, I redid it a slightly different way, using a T-Test to look at whether there's a difference in the number of wins, losses, and draws between the two conferences during inter-conference play. Here's the summary table for each conference.

Team	Wins	Draws	Losses
SKC	6	2	1
HOU	4	1	2
NER	4	1	3
CLB	3	2	2
NYR	2	3	2
DCU	2	2	2
PHI	2	2	4
CHI	2	1	4
MON	2	1	5
TFC	0	1	4
Average	2.70	1.60	2.90
Standard Deviation	1.64	0.70	1.29
Team	Wins	Draws	Losses
SEA	4	3	2
SJE	4	2	2
RSL	4	1	2
COR	4	1	3
VAN	3	3	2
POR	3	2	2
FCD	3	2	5
CHV	2	1	4
LAG	2	1	5
Average	3.22	1.78	3.00
Standard Deviation	0.83	0.83	1.32

So I fed each set of data (# of wins for each team, # of draws for each team, and number of losses for each team) and came up with the following P values from the T-Test.

Wins
T Test P Value	0.39
Draws
T Test P Value	0.62
Losses
T Test P Value	0.87

Obviously the big one is the Wins, as that would be where you'd see a real difference if one conference was better than the other. Though it looks like your average Western team has done a bit better than your average eastern team, the P value of 0.39 suggests that there's really no statistical significance at any serious level. It's not as non-existent as I had posited earlier, there is some tendancy for the West to win a little more than the East, but it's not clear that the West is definitely the better conference either.

If we ever get stable conferences and can track the results from year to year that would be a much better way to look at it, but on a Year 2012 basis only I'm still not quite convinced.

Also, here's a sort of nifty chart that really doesn't explain much. It's the win distribution for Eastern Teams, Western Teams, and all MLS Teams if the distribution was normal.