Scoring Disparity in Women's NCAA hockey
Scoring Disparity in Women's NCAA hockey
What has the first half of the 2024 season taught us about scoring, and how does that relate to years past?
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In the NCAA, scoring is primarily driven by top performing teams, and overall, is driven by top teams beating weaker teams by a wide margin.
Establishing a +/- 20 rank cutoff, we can see that unequal games have in the past 5 years, had one more goal in the game than more even games, while the goal differential extends to be almost 2 full goals more in unequal games.
Using Wisconsin as a case study, we can see that rank difference alone explains 33% of the variance in goal differential in Wisconsin wins.