Importance of Parity

If you ever had a chance to speak to my dad before he passed away about fantasy hockey, then you’ve probably heard the term ‘parity’ before. He used to talk about the importance of “keeping parity in the league” quite often. This concern was one of many qualities that made my dad such a good leader.

Now the reigns have passed to me and I've begun wondering how my league is doing. First, let's define what parity is:

"Parity in sports is defined as attempting to make an equal playing field for all participants... When parity in a sports league is achieved, all participating teams enjoy roughly equivalent levels of talent." -Wikipedia 

In a yearly redraft league, parity isn't much of a concern since players are not kept from season to season. It is basically like hitting a reset button at the end of each season.

Keeper leagues add a fun and strategic element to fantasy hockey. There are many different keeper formats out there, and each have their own unique strategies and challenges. For some examples, read the article titled Designing the perfect keeper league.

Since some players are 'kept' from season to season, teams have a chance to improve their teams as time goes on. Keepers also make it is possible for some teams to become significantly better than others. It is for this reason that keeper leagues need to carefully monitor and manage their rules in order to maintain competitive parity.

Parity isn't always an easy thing to measure. One way to do it is to look at the final standings and team rosters. Another interesting way to measure league parity is to use standard deviation. In A History of MLB Parity, standard deviation of wins was used to measure the parity of Major League Baseball. I thought it might be interesting to do something similar for Zoo Zone. Here is the result:

Note that our keeper league started with the 07-08 season. According to this graph, our league parity remained the same and then got worse after our keeper league started. It's hard to draw any conclusions on such a limited data set, especially since there are a lot of factors that can influence team performance. However, it does give us one way to visualize parity trends.

It is important to be proactive when managing parity in any fantasy sports league. The recent drop in my league is no reason to panic, since it is only a single season. However, it is best to think about questions like "Why did it get worse this year?" and "Will it continue to get worse next year?".