Shorthanded goals are powerplay killers. You hear this all
the time when you watch hockey games. But how true is this conventional wisdom?
It certainly doesn't seem very common for a team to concede a shorthanded goal
and then quickly follow it with a powerplay goal of their own. But it's also
true that a majority of powerplays don't result in a goal, regardless of whether a SHG was conceded or not.
The question of how much SHGs kill a team's momentum on the
powerplay is one that I've always thought about. Below, I take a first crack at
answering the question. I show that having a SHG scored against you lowers your probability of scoring a PPG by about 10 percentage points. And early shorthanded goals have a bigger effect on a team's powerplay momentum that late ones.
