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Originally Posted by FanIn80
Oh ok. So what you're saying is that NHL teams don't have to score more goals than they allow in order to be effective.
Do you have evidence of this? Can you show me multiple seasons where teams at the top of the standings didn't have a positive goal differential? What about Stanley Cup winners... what's the percentage of champions who had a negative goal differential in the playoffs vs a positive one?
I mean, you might be able to show a slight uptick in ENGs, depending on your selected range, but calling goal differential 'useless' is a stretch, unless of course you can prove that it's useless.
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No. Where did you get that from? They have to score exactly one more goal than their opposition to win. Three, four, ten goals, doesn't matter. It's the same result. You win exactly one game. It isn't baseball where there are individual and independent trials; they can change strategies (pulling the goaltender) to increase the likelihood of scoring for both teams.
A 40%, and counting, increase of empty net goals in nine years shows that teams are becoming more familiar with this.
I did not call goal differential useless, what I said was:
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Goal differential is increasingly useless as a measure of team effectiveness with the number of ENGs skyrocketing(...)
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I think goal differential can be a proxy for evaluation of a team when ENGs are stripped out, since teams who are pulling their goalie don't much care about allowing an ENG.