If you listen to sports announcers long enough you will eventually hear them go on at length about how important it is to score first. Theyll give some sort of psychological reason and then point out the high percentage of times that the team that scores first wins the game. One of them is bound to use the phrase the all important first goal. Its almost entirely a statistical artifact that doesnt have all that much meaning. The definition of winning is scoring the most points. Since the team that wins scored the most times, a pure random distribution is going to have them scoring the first goal most of the time. If a game is a shutout, the team that scores first wins 100% of the time. If the final score is 2-1, we would expect the team that scored first to win 67% of the time just by random chance. If its 3-1, the team that scored first should win 75%. And so on. We would expect the exact same thing to be true of the team that scores the second point of the game and the third point. And that is largely the way it is. If anything, theres a higher correlation between scoring the second point than there is with the first point, so long as you remember not to count the shutouts. If you want to find a team that does well or poorly when scoring or allowing the first point you need to compare them to the average for all teams, not .500. This year the Gophers are 8-1-1 when they give up the first goal.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 02:20:46 +0000
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