Several people asked me to put up a graph for goals allowed to complement the goals scored graph I did before. In part this is due to the insane hockey following UND enjoys. Also, the recent stellar performance of the goalie with a crazy streak of minutes without allowing a goal begs the question of how this team is doing compared to others.

The two graphs together provide a more complete picture of UND performance this year (obviously). There is something else made clear after looking at the two graphs: the defensive performance of UND so far this year is something special.

The dashed line at the bottom is this year’s total for goals allowed. While goals scored this year was nothing out of the ordinary when compared with other recent years, the goals allowed is well below the typical performance. If they had more data available online I might tell you it is nearing historic levels, but they do not so I cannot.

As I look more into hockey analytics with my colleague it surely seems like defensive statistics will need to be evaluated for their relative contribution to team win probabilties.

This work by Flynnglis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International