The effectiveness of pulling the goalie
Has anyone looked into how effective pulling the goalie to catch up is? I haven't been able to find anything good online, other than qualitative arguments, of course. There's also no readily available data on teams scoring goals this way, so I made a histogram for the 2014/15 NHL season posted below. Note that this only includes goals where the goalie was pulled to make up for being behind and does not include delayed penalty situations.
Anyway, the argument for pulling a goalie is that you're already behind, so why not. You either lose, or you maybe make up for it and push it to overtime. However, I don't see this as a no potential loss scenario. Namely, sure, you could score a goal with the goalie pulled, but you could also score a goal with the goalie not pulled. So if you're being too aggressive, you might just get into a bunch of empty net goals that seal your loss instead of scoring regularly by only being more aggressive in terms of how you play with the goalie left in the net. I see arguments for both sides, but I don't see one argument in and of itself being "obviously" better.
Oh, by the way, does anyone have any data on how aggressive coaches were with this tactic? I don't have the time to look at every game sheet now and manually record that. From observation alone, I know Roy was quick to pull the goalie trigger, and if I remember correctly, Dallas was quite aggressive, as well. I can't really say anything about other teams.
Cheers to a good discussion.