There's a table which distinguishes home-team v away-team statistics, and there's about a 50% chance of shooting more over the next three minutes compared to the rest of the game after a fight (ie "momentum") for both teams.
I think you're missing the point. The study is just on the effects of "a fight" in the game. A fight invloves both teams. There's no distinction made between who wins the fight or who starts the fight.
According to the data, 39% of the time, either both teams increase, stay flat, or decrease. The net effect gives no (or marginal) advantage to either team. The other 61%, one team increases relative to the other, but it doesn't truly specify which team. This means that while being involved in a fight can sometimes help, it can also hurt you at other times.
The 3rd table suggests that if a team with high momentum is involved in a fight, their momentum tends to decrease, while a team with low momentum tends to increase. So you need to limit your fighting to only those instances where your team has low momentum, and your oppenent is high in order to gain the maximum benefit.
However, that "maximum" according to this study is worth about .2 goals, or 1/30th of a win.
Now let's put that in some perspective. I'll assume we are only interested in instances where this hypothetical fight actually changes the outcome of a game from a loss to a win. I doubt anyone really cares about shifting momentum in a game we would win regardless. So at the basic level, you'd need 30 such situations (games where you are well behind in momentum and will lose the game) to equal one win. (That also means you lose the other 29.)
But that isn't really accurate, because it doesn't take into account the situation in the game already. If you're already down by three goals by the time you realize you need to shift momentum, you'll likely need a lot more than 30 fights to get enough impact to overcome the defecit. To what order of magnitude is a guess, but let's just say double. So maybe a fight can turn a loss into a win 1 in 60.
But even that isn't really accurate. What the study fails to address is the fact that momentum changes over the course of a game regardless of fights. It is very often cyclical, in that teams will have a burst of high momentum, then drop while the other team has its burst. To actually calculate the effect of the fight, you need to compare these results to the expected rate of change if the fight had not occurred. Let's say that cuts the efficacy of the fight in half. Now you're turning a loss into a win 1 in 120. Coincidentally, 120 is the number of regular-season losses the Wings have had total since we won the Cup in 08.
So assuming that in every one of those losses there was some point where we had low momentum and the other team was high, and we were very careful in picking our spots for our fights, we could have one more win over the last 3 1/2 seasons. Wow.
Or to make it all more simple, we'll just stick with the conclusion from the study:
Overall these results suggest that fighting by itself does not significantly help a team score more goals or win more games...
Edited by Buppy, 12 January 2012 - 01:44 AM.
