In hockey, when a player scores a goal, they always mention the time in whatever period the goal is scored. Why is that an important statistic? My hockey aficionados haven’t yet come up with an answer. So please, I hope you can provide me with the answer.
To be ignorant of ones ignorance is the malady of ignorance
Amos Bronson Alcott
The time of a goal is important primarily because of penalties.
The time of a penalty is always recorded so there is no dispute as to when a player may leave the penalty box.
You note the time of a goal so you can tell if the goal came during a power play or not.
Another reason for noting the time of a goal is you have an official record of all the events in a game.
Basketball keeps fairly exact records on such things as when timeouts were called and who called them.
Football officials also write down the exact time all timeouts and scoring plays happened. In fact, there was a whole mailbag article devoted to that topic.
Additionally, if you didn’t see the game, you can look and tell if it was a see-saw battle, or if either team scored a bunch of unanswered goals…
-sb
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Thanks, guys; good replies!
To be ignorant of ones ignorance is the malady of ignorance
Amos Bronson Alcott
Another reason, being a hockey player myself, would be that if you score more than one goal and are chated out of it on the score sheet, you can usually remember which was yours by the approximate time it was scored. For example, if you score three goals in one game (Hattrick. Whee!), one in the first period, and two in the second, you want recognition for all of them, specially for the hattrick. So if one of the Second period goals was in the early part ogf the period, and the next goal was in the middle, you can usually tell which is yours. It’s also used for stats like “How many goals in how short of a time?”, personal and team-wise.
As it has been covered, recording times of goals is important for timekeeping, record keeping, and general accuracy and completion of statistics.
The reason it is frequently reported with the game details, is similar to why football and basketball reports the scoring by quarter, and baseball lists the box scores including runs by inning. Soccer and Hockey report goals by time because it quickly tells the reader how the game was played. The reader can look at the scores and see that one team scored alot early, and the game was never close, and the late goals scored to bring it close were irrelavent and against a weak second line. Or it can show that goals were scored at the very end when a goalie may have been pulled. It may be exciting to see that a large series of goals were scored in a uncommonly short period of time.
In short, time, along with just about every concievable detail of a score and of the game as a whole, is recorded. The time is reported to paint as complete a picture of the game as possible in as small a space as possible.
Hockey and soccer use time of a goal, as opposed to scoring by period, because they are low scoring enough where including the extra data isn’t cumbersome. Football and basketball by comparison would actually lose the reader because a laundry list of scores would overburden the reader.
Along these lines, I should ask:
If a goal scores AFTER the buzzer, but the shot was initiated PRIOR to the buzzer, does th goal count? WAG: Yes.
“They’re coming to take me away ha-ha, ho-ho, hee-hee, to the funny farm where life is beautiful all the time… :)” - Napoleon IV
For a goal in ice hockey to count, the entire puck must cross the goal line BEFORE the siren goes off indicating the end of the period. It is not like basketball and football in that respect, where you can score after time has expired.
The only exception to this would be the awarding of a penalty shot after time has expired.
Jinx, the answer is no. The puck must completely cross the goal line before time runs out. If the puck is only partially across the line or has not yet reached the goal line, the goal is not counted. Unlike basketball, a shot is dead immediately after time runs out.
Those posts were almost simultaneous
Here’s how the scoring would read