11. The Stats Guy
The stats guy has far too much time on his hands at work. He has a long list of usually irrelevant stats memorized and he’s ready to tell you exactly why Team A is going to beat Team B. He’s researched every matchup and doesn’t believe in anything that isn’t explained by math.
The stats guy is a lot of fun when his team is losing. He’s run all of the numbers twice. There’s no way his team is losing. The words luck, magic or playoff hockey don’t exist in his vocabulary. The stats guy lives and dies by the stats.
The stats guy can sometimes self-destruct and start listing off stats that make no sense when he doesn’t know how to compute what is happening to his team:
“The Lightning are 3-0 when Stamkos scores the second goal of the game, the concession sells more than $5,000 worth of hot dogs and there is brief rain shower between 3:34 p.m. and 4:27 p.m. in the state of Florida.”
Relax, nerd. Your team is losing because it’s the playoffs and everything you think makes mathematical sense sometimes doesn’t. As the age-old saying goes, that’s why they play the games.
Perhaps even more insufferable is this person getting a series win. If the stats guy’s team wins, he can tell you exactly why. He’ll bore you for hours with various things he’s calculated through the series, then he’s back to the record books for Round 2.