Expoundation. Heh.

Well folks, the time has come to dig just a little deeper into the BTP stat engine I've set up over the course of this weekend.

If you need a refresher on what we're trying to measure, look no further than here. For those of you who shy away from lynx (I got bit by one last week har har), a quick blurb might do you good.

In order to quantify the importance of a given goal, a set of rules must be established. What we're trying to determine here is not whether a certain goal has value to the team (as stated before, "nearly every goal scored during the course of a hockey game is important"), but which goals are the most important to the team.

1) The object of a hockey game is to outscore your opponent, leading to a win. We can then say that the most important goals are the ones that present the team with a mathematical opportunity to achieve victory.

2) Therefore, goals that provide an opportunity to win are those that tie the game, and those that put the team into the lead. Both of the aforementioned types yield a situation where the specific team is in an environment that is conducive to victory.

3) Shootout goals are not included due to the fact that they are not a part of a normal game. It can't be applied to a playoff situation, so it will be ignored.

In order to differentiate between various goals-scored situations, the aforementioned BTP's have been broken into five categories:

• 1st Period Goal/Assist
• 2nd Period Goal/Assist
• 3rd Period Goal/Assist
• 3rd Period Goal/Assist (last five minutes of the period)
• Overtime Goal/Assist

The raw data dump follows (discluding anyone under 3 BTP's):

[Editor's Note]: All the following information is updated as of December 8th at 1:30 AM.

Once again, I caution that a raw data dump only shows a snapshot of what we are attempting to measure (although this does a whole lot better job of isolating situations). That being said, there's a few things we can take away now that goals have been broken into subsets.

1) General breakdown of the statistics- 42% of BTP's come in the first period, 30% in the second period, 18% in the third period, 6.66% with 5 minutes left in the third period, and 3.33% in overtime.

2) An astounding 43.75% of Joe Thornton's BTP's come after the second period. This tells me that although he is racking up points during the first forty minutes, his production during crunch time has not suffered in the least.

3) Although Jeremy Roenick doesn't get on the board that often, 4/5 of his BTP's come in the third period. When JR puts the team in an opportunity to win, he scores late. Roenick seems to be making the most of his limited ice time in the waning stages of the game.

4) The leaders for each individual period vary, but some notable players do stand out. Devin Setoguchi, Dan Boyle, Patrick Marleau, and the Joe's (Pavelski, Thornton) all show an inclination to get on the BTP board throughout the course of the entire game with both goals and assists.

There's a lot you can pull out of this, so if you see any interesting trends fire away in the comments. I'll be back later this week before the Anaheim game to set the stage for using this during the course of the season.

Go Sharks.