The Importance of 2nd and 3rd Goals

Sometimes you don't know what you've got sitting in front of you. Story goes that a relative of mine ordered something from an infomercial which arrived with a set of circular decorative pieces. Not knowing what they were, they were cycled through a variety of uses and purposes. It was only some time later during the holiday season that a guest wondered aloud why there were napkin rings on the Christmas tree. On Thursday I put together a crude statistical assessment of the value of a goal [What's a goal worth?]. In doing so I found the winning percentage of a team based on their goal total. All just as a step along the way to putting a value on a single average goal. Looking back over the numbers it occurred to me that I hadn't given enough attention to those intermediary statistics. A graph of winning percentage based on goals scored looks like this: Not surprisingly, the more goals scored, the more points a team is likely to earn. Obviously. But by looking at the...