Stat Shorts - Taylor Accursi 3rd Period Wonder?
Today we are launch a new segment on site, “Stats Shorts” where I do small scale data analytics and answer fun questions I see on twitter.
This episodes investigation comes courtey of Taylor Accursi’s 3rd period goal in the Beauts Home Opener during the 2021-22 Season.
To start with we used data from the 2018 season to the 2021 season broken down by skater and then by period. In addition to this we also calculated the percentage of a players goals that occurred in the third period as a means of standardizing the metric.
As seen in the table below Accursi is an outlier in regards to the number of 3 period goals in relation to her total goal count, with only one player having more 3 period goals than here during the time period analysed (spoiler alert: Its Jillian Dempsey).
However while Accursi (represented here by the blue dot) is clear reaching for stratosphere the number of goals she has scores in comparison to her peers still needs to be taken into consideration hence the usage of the 3rd period percentage metric that we mentioned earlier.
As we can see about more than 50% of her goals come in the 3rd period more (somewhat significantly more than the somewhat expected 35%). This number while impressive still have little meaning without comparison so without further ado lets provide some additional contextualisation.
The table above looks at players that between 2018-2021 scored more than 20 total goals, as we can see Accursi is a step ahead of all them with a 10% gap between her and the nearest scorer with an almost 10% gap.
IN CONCLUSION: TAYLOR ACCURSI IS STATISTICALLY THE 3RD PERIOD CLUTCH QUEEN.