I knew the answer to this one because I had posed it myself a few years
back.  But it has always seemed to me to be the wrong way to keep track
of it.  A 6-second power play is not very meaningful in that you will
almost never have an opportunity to actually score during that 6
seconds.  To me a much more meaningful statistic would be a ratio of PP
goals to PP seconds (or turn it over as seconds/goals for readibility
sake, or even convert back to minutes for the ratios).  A 6 second power
play during which you do not score barely affects that ratio and this
makes more sense to me.

Someone once suggested that when you actually kept track of things this
way (PP/minute of PP time versus PP/opportunity) you got virtually the
same result.  Maybe, maybe not - it still would make more sense to me.
And notice how that clears up the problem of the 5 minute major.  So why
not?

Tom Rowe                            UWSP dept of Psych
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