With just eight games left in the season, there’s only a little drama regarding the final playoff spots:

To make it into the top 6, Atlanta needs to win its final two matches (against Boston and Dallas). To make it into the playoffs, Chengdu has to hope the LA Valiant lose their final two matches (against San Francisco and the Gladiators). Both of these are credible scenarios, and I’ve essentially predicted both as having roughly 57% odds. The square root of 0.57 is 0.75, so this means that my system predicts a 75% chance of victory (for Atlanta x2 and for San Francisco and Vancouver) for each of those four critical games.

Maybe that’s a little low for the Atlanta games, for as badly as Boston and Dallas have played, and for as well as Los Angeles’ opponents have played. Stage 4’s wackiness has really had a major impact on season-long predictions, which this table uses, but overall, I’d say things have come out mostly according to expectations. Although I did only have Atlanta with an 0.9% chance of making the top 6 when the stage started…

But let’s look at something a little more entertaining: the Stage 4 playoff picture! What, there are no playoffs in Stage 4? Who cares? Here’s how things are looking like they would shake out if there were:

Unlike the first chart in this post, this one is just using the SRS and SAMP for Stage 4, which means Washington is a powerhouse and New York is … well, bad.

Six teams have clinched “playoff” spots, with the Valiant also being pretty close to securing a spot. Using Stage 4 SAMP, the Valiant are actually better than their crosstown rivals. Chengdu and London are both sitting at 4-3, +0, but both the Gladiators (3-3, +0) and Spark (3-3, -1) have a good chance of passing them with a victory this weekend.

As for the divisional races … well, I’m going to have to give a mea culpa plea here. My system can break ties via differential — like realizing a 4-3, +2 team is better than a 4-3, +1 team — but beyond that I rely on either my detecting things manually or a random factor. I know that head-to-head record is the next tiebreaker, but in a stage with just seven games, that rarely applies. Also, seven games is a very small sample size to begin with and can lead to some odd … well, odds.

So, here’s the thing: Atlanta is currently 5-0, +13. Washington is 6-1, +15. It’s obvious that Atlanta could go 1-1 this weekend and finish behind Washington and not win its division. But because the Reign have been so good this stage, and its opponents so awful, they’ve got a 99+% chance of beating each of their opponents with this method. Even a 1-1 could get them the division, with a 4-0 win and 2-3 loss. They’ll have to do worse than that to lose out to Washington and my system doesn’t see that happening in its 1,000 simulations.

As for the Pacific, it’s a near toss-up between Hangzhou and San Francisco, but look at Vancouver and its 1.3 chance. The Spark are currently 6-1, +15. The Titans are 4-1, +7. That means Vancouver would have to 4-0 both its games to get a tie. (Vancouver plays San Francisco, which is currently 5-0, +13, so an 0-4 loss would automatically remove the Shock from divisional contention.) Then they’d have to win the tiebreaker with Hangzhou, which is … well, I don’t know. My system just applies a 50/50 chance, with the results you see above. If Vancouver wouldn’t have a chance of winning that tiebreaker, then their odds of winning the division are zero.

All of this is really just the long way of saying:

1. I have too much spare time; and
2. Washington and Florida were robbed of their rightly deserved playoff spots.

If you take nothing else from all this, let it be that.