Home Ice Advantage - Preliminaries

I just uploaded a spreadsheet to Google Docs, taking a good look at home ice advantage trends throughout the playoffs.  My spreadsheet reaches back to the 1987 playoffs, which was the first season the NHL went to a playoffs consisting of four best-of-seven series.  I have the data broken down into numbers by round, as well as splits between the Eastern and Western conferences for each round, along with totals for each round, each playoff, and for the total time period.  For the finals, I just called games hosted by the Eastern representative as the Eastern home games, and the same for the West.  You may notice that the 1988 finals has 3 games played in the West, and 1 in the East.  This was due to G4 in Boston being stopped for a power outage, with a tie score, and they resumed G4 in Edmonton, in what should've been G5.  

There's a few things I plan on doing with this data, but for now I thought I'd just stick the spreadsheet up along with my methodology, which I believe should be just fine.  After tonight's game 7's, I could definitely stand to crash.  I should be able to get some conclusions about this data up in the next couple days, as well as use it to support a couple of ideas of mine.  Plus, having it up and easy to grab makes it easy for me to play with it at work too.  

Data for this chart was compiled in large part from Wikipedia's list of NHL seasons, and for the two missing years, I had to compile the data from hockey-reference and the Hockey Summary Project.  

Per the Hockey Summary Project: The information used herein was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by The Hockey Summary Project. For more information about the Hockey Summary Project please visit:

http://hsp.flyershistory.com

or

http://sports.groups.yahoo.com/group/hockey_summary_project/