As Andrew Coyne recently wrote on his weblog,

Hockey commentary is always moronic, but it reaches a special intensity of moronitude at playoff time.

Indeed. During the final game of the Lighting-Flames series, the commenatators made much of the fact that no team in the last 33 years returned from a 2-0 defecit in game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals.

This fact was supposed to demonstrate the desperate position the Flames were in after being down 2-0 in the middle of the second period.

Ummm. What are the chances of the Stanley cup going to game 7 and one team being up 2-0 at some point in the game? These are two independent events and one wouldnt expect them to combine very often -- which is enough to explain why you must go back quite far to find a blown 2-0 lead.

On a related note: during the first game of the Lakers-Pistons series, "Lakers are on an 8-4 run" was flashed on the screen.

Lets assume a model where the teams are exactly equal and during each possession each scores a basket with the same probability p. The probability that during the course of a basketball game, there exists one period where one of the teams outscores the other 8-4 is pretty close to 1.

An "8-4 run" is a completely meaningless statistical fact.