Last time, I looked at the odds of the Shanghai Dragons going 0-40, which actually happened. This time around, I’d like to use the same approach in a hypothetical case: What would have been the chances of the New York Excelsior winning all of their games on the season?

It wasn’t that far off from happening. Of the NYXL’s six regular-season losses, five were of the 3-2 variety and one was a 3-1. That 3-1 came against the Boston Uprising in the second-to-last game of the season. Unlike the Dragons, who certainly were motivated enough to try and win one of their 40 games, the Excelsior, even with their talent level, might have eased up near the end of the season, making a 40-0 season a bit more unlikely; three of their six losses overall came in that fourth stage.

We can’t estimate that, however, so we’ll just have to go with what the numbers tell us and assume New York did and would have tried its hardest to will all of its contests.

New York’s SAMP was 0.7232. That translates into an 86.6% chance of winning each match against an average (SAMP = 0.5) team. 0.866^40 = 0.00319, meaning that:

Against an average schedule, New York would have had a 0.319% chance of winning every game.

That’s quite a bit less likely than the odds Shanghai faced, and for good reason, since New York didn’t actually win every game, while the Dragons lost all of theirs. As with the Dragons, I’ll check New York’s chances against their real schedule.

New York’s chances of going 40-0 against their actual schedule is also lower: 0.1339%, or about one in 750.

The Dragons had a one in five chance of going 0-40, so I probably can’t run a few simulated seasons to get a 40-0 Excelsior run. But I’ll still do 10 seasons and see how close I can get!

The average across these 10 seasons is 34.4 wins. The best I can manage is 37 wins, which comes up in two seasons. Of the six losses across those two seasons, three come at the hands of Seoul. Both of those seasons featured a 16-game winning streak, but that had nothing on Season #10, where New York started 21-0! That team still “only” finished 34-6, the same as the real NYXL.

The Dynasty and the Outlaws managed the best against the Excelsior, with 10 wins each in 40 matchups, which is a little surprising, considering their second-tier SAMPs (6^th and 7^th in the league). The two bottom teams in the league, Shanghai and Florida, never beat New York, while Dallas managed a single win in season #4.

“OK, but about that 1 in 750 chance…” Fine. I’ll try setting up a quickie simulation of 1,000 seasons. Hang on a sec, this is going to take a while, even for a spreadsheet …

And, success! New York went 40-0 in Season #851. Meanwhile, the worst record was just 26 wins, in Season #674.

But clearly, the most important question is: In 4,000 matchups, did New York ever lose to Shanghai, which it had a 99.7% chance of beating? The answer is “yes.” In fact, I can even see a loss right there in Season #1 on my spreadsheet. Overall, it happened 17 times, which translates to a 99.575% win rate for New York. Hey, anything is possible – at least in a numerical simulation.