Margin of Victory

If you look at the MSHL (Maryland Scholastic Hockey League) website you can see the scores of the first week's games. Looking at the scores you will see there were close games and others that were not close. One of the hardest things for a head coach to make high school players understand is that there is a point in a game where your team has scored enough goals to win the game and not embarrass your opponent. I have told my team that a seven goal difference is when we stop scoring. I point out to my team that they would not like it if another team ran up the score against them and they agree they would not like that. However, one of the items used to rank teams is the number of goals scored by the team so it is not easy for the players to understand.