A note on the importance of the first goal in a National Hockey League game

Jack Brimberg and W.J. Hurley

International Journal of Operational Research, 2009, vol. 6, issue 2, 282-287

Abstract: In their pregame assessments of which team will win an important hockey game, TV commentators will often point out the importance of scoring the first goal, suggesting that a team improves its chances of winning considerably by scoring it. In this note, we use some simple probability theory to calculate how a team's chance of winning (and losing) changes after the first goal.

Keywords: conditional probability; first goal; NHL; National Hockey League; Poisson distribution; exponential distribution; goal scoring. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
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