Anatomy Of A Playoff Fan

Watching tonight's Game 5 between Detroit and Pittsburgh (which hasn't been exciting enough yet to hold my interest), I got thinking about how I could represent the heartbeat of a team (and its fans) in terms of how the team does in the playoffs each year. To give me some data to play with, I decided to use the 35 playoff years making up my lifetime as a New York Rangers fan (to date), which are 1974 through 2009 (minus 2005, when there was no postseason).

To reflect the highs and lows, I decided to use the following points system:

0 = missing the playoffs
1 = losing in the 1st round
2 = losing in the 2nd round
3 = losing in the 3rd round
4 = losing in the 4th round
5 = winning the Stanley Cup

(In the first couple years of this stretch, the Cup Final was the 3rd round so my points system's not perfect, but...)

Next, in order to emphasize the geometric (rather than linear) satisfaction that comes with seeing your team advance through the playoffs, I took the point results for each year and applied a simple squaring function to them:

0 = missing the playoffs
1 = losing in the 1st round
4 = losing in the 2nd round
9 = losing in the 3rd round
16 = losing in the 4th round
25 = winning the Stanley Cup

Then I graphed those results:


And there you have it... my heartbeat (synchronized to the franchise that often causes me so much grief) for the past 35 years!