Warning: Numbers post. Abandon all hope, ye who etc.
Here’s one of those UnFun Facts. We’ve done the whole Pythagorean Winning Percentage thing in the past. (Easily found in the archives with a search.) Didn’t want to go doing the whole league again — response to it has always been tepid — but thought Bridgeport’s season presented an interesting mini-note.
After 14 games, when Bridgeport was 10-4, its GF-GA were 48-39 (not counting the shootout win bonus). Squaring those and plugging them into the formula, that’s a .602 theoretically expected winning percentage, or, over a possible 28 points, an expected 16.8 points. (Count the shootout win as a tie, and the Tigers “were” 9-4-1, 19 points. High but not outlandish.)
They’ve been outscored dramatically since. Again taking out the shootouts, they’re at 63-73 now. That’s an expected .427 winning percentage. Take that over a possible 42 points, and their expected total is 17.9 points. It’s not really safe to take these stats and use them to look at chunks of a season, but I just thought it was kind of funny (in that unfunny way). They had an expected 16.8 on Nov. 19. They have an expected 17.9 now. And in that time, they have earned just one point.
OK, even for an unfun fact, that wasn’t very unfun. Let’s try this one.
A couple of years ago, when Bridgeport had an awful record when allowing the first goal, I dashed off a table with an idea stolen from an old Tom Benjamin post.
I’d been thinking about doing this for about a week, then.
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I hope that makes sense. For example, when Bridgeport scores the first goal, it’s 5-2, including the shootout loss to Worcester last weekend. When its opponents score the fifth goal of a game, Bridgeport is 2-8, again including Worcester’s shootout win. I’m treating the two shootout games as ties. You know me.
The clear message: Don’t you dare score fourth. No, the message remains that scoring is good, and getting scored on is bad. It’s kind of early in the season, so it’s a smallish sample size in some ways, but the message still shines.
For the sake of it, here’s how that chart looked when the team was 10-4:
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