One, two, shoot!

This is a carryover from the “What’s the Deal With…” portion of this week’s Weekly.

This was another one of those things where I was desperate for a note, and I came up with one dumb thing, and then I wondered what it looked like over a larger sample…

The whole shoot-first-or-second-in-the-shootout question. Does it matter? Click the “continue reading” link below to view the data, all through Tuesday’s games.

For two years, the home team was required to shoot second:

And then things changed, and the home team had the choice. Here’s the charts:

Home team, overall

Home team chooses to shoot second

Home team chooses to shoot first

All teams, shooting second

*-All 2007-08 data is through Tuesday.

(Wednesday, there were two shootouts; the home team won both, but Providence chose to go first, while Grand Rapids went second.)

Interestingly, by Dec. 31, 2006, the home team had only chosen to shoot first nine times out of 50 shootouts, and home teams in that case had gone 3-6. After New Year’s, when a home team went first, it went 14-12.

Obviously, none of this takes into account the teams’ relative strengths, player availability, anything that affects the numbers other than home/away, first/second. One hopes those would even out over three and a quarter seasons. Looking at the wide swing between the home team’s edge in 2004-05 and the road team’s edge in 2005-06 under the same shooting-second conditions, I wonder if there’s really an advantage to either. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with the rest of this season. Perhaps a trend develops; the home team and the second-shooters seem to have a slight edge, but not a big one, so far.

But I still think it’d be easier to flip a coin.

(For what it’s worth, I’m no fan of the baseball analogy that you’d always want last licks. In baseball, you may be manufacturing one run, or you may need to create more than one, and you can manipulate your bench and your bullpen and your strategy accordingly. In the shootout, it’s an X or an O — you score, or you don’t, and you’ve already set your lineup.)

(And for what it’s worth, here’s AHL teams at home, counting OTLs as losses, in games that were decided before the shootout:)