 Statistics aren't part of hockey's rules per se, but I think it's important to have an understanding of the common ways that we compare one player to the next. So let's take a look at a few common stats in this video. Being that the way a game is won is by scoring more goals than the other team, it makes sense that one of the main ways to compare one player to the next is by the number of goals that they score. The record for the most goals scored in one NHL season, which is 82 games long, is 92 goals by Wayne Gretzky. He's considered to be one of, if not the best player in the history of hockey. He scored those 92 goals during the 1981-82 season and for a few reasons you probably won't see that record broken anytime soon. The main reason is that goalies wore smaller pads back then and scoring in general across the league was higher. Still, it's quite an accomplishment and as I said I doubt it'll be broken anytime soon. To give you a better idea of the modern game, Alex Ovechkin scored 65 goals in 2007-2008, so that's the most anybody scored in the last 10 years. Not every goal is entirely the result of the scorer's action though. Sometimes a really good pass from a teammate can make it easy to put the puck in the back of the net, so this is why we have the stat of assists. If player is awarded an assist, if he was one of two players to touch the puck right before the guy who scored the goal, assuming that nobody on the other team touched it in the meantime. So let's say our guy here on the right has the puck and he skates down with his teammate. He passes the puck to his teammate and his teammate scores. In this case the guy who shot the puck would receive credit for the goal, but the guy who passed it to him would get the assist. Each goal can have up to two assists. Because goals and assists are so closely related, the category of points created and points are very simple to calculate. It's simply the number of goals that a player has added to the number of assists that he has. Plus minus is a very simple way to try to incorporate both offense and defense into one stat. The way that it works is that if you are on the ice when your team scores a goal, you get a plus one. And if you are on the ice when the other team scores a goal, you get a minus one. There are a few exceptions to this. First, power play goals are not considered for plus minus. So a power play goal will not earn you a plus. And if you are on the penalty kill and the other team scores against you, that will not count against you. It's not a minus. A short-handed goal though is counted in plus minus. Another record that you will probably never see broken is Bobby Orr's plus minus record of 124 in one season. Nowadays you're really good if you get around a plus 30 over the whole season. To get a plus 40 or 50 is rare, but it is possible. This is a particularly telling stat for defensemen like Zidane O'Chara, who was among the league leaders with a 33 plus 33 in both the 2010-11 and the 2011-12 seasons. Because this signals that if he was on the ice, you were going to have a really tough time scoring against him. You might hear somebody refer to something called PIMS. And what PIMS means is just the way we pronounce P-I-M, which is an abbreviation for penalties in minutes. Because penalties are varying lengths, usually two or five minutes, it is more fair to keep track of penalty minutes rather than the number of penalties a player is called for. The league leader in penalty minutes will probably be somewhere in the 200s over a season, though they could get up into the 300s if they are particularly hardcore. This one might be a little confusing at first. Taking a shot seems like a simple enough stat to keep track of, but if it is to be counted as a shot on goal, it must, in the judgment of a scorekeeper, be a shot that would have gone into the net had the goalie not been there to stop it. Technically, even if a shot gets past the goalie, but hits the goal post and bounces away, it is not counted as a shot on goal. Block shots or shots that go wide in the net are also not counted. So usually when you hear somebody refer to the number of shots a player or a team has, they are talking about the number of shots on goal. As a side note, I am noticing more and more announcers referring to attempted shots, which is different than shots on goal. Obviously an attempted shot is anything that's whacked in the general vicinity of the goal, but not all of these will be counted as shots on goal. So if you hear about a team that has faced a high number of attempted shots, but a low number of shots on goal, this means they're doing a very good job of blocking shots before they even get to the goalie. And speaking of goalies, as they have a highly specialized position, they also have their own set of stats. The simplest of goalie stats is probably the number of goals that they have allowed to go in the net or goals against. Obviously a shortcoming of this stat is going to be comparing goalies with a lot of playing time to those who haven't played as much, which is why we have our next stat of goals against average. Goals against average is an average number of goals given up by a goalie per game. So it's kind of like the equivalent to a pitcher's ERA and baseball. To find goals against average, we take the number of goals allowed, modify this by 60, and then divide that value by the amount of time a goalie has played, being that one game is 60 minutes long. The best goals against average over a season will probably be around two, which it means that that goalie has allowed an average of two goals per game. The shortcoming of goals against average is that it only takes time played into account, which could hurt or help a goalie, depending on how good or bad his team is at stopping shots from getting to him in the first place. A goalie could play a game and allow two goals on 10 shots or allow two goals on 30 shots. Even though both goalies goals against average will be two, they obviously have not been equal. This is why we have the stat of save percentage, which is simply the number of saves made divided by the number of shots that goalie has faced. Most goalies will want to be saving over 90% of the shot snake face or have a save percentage of 900 as it's written out, usually to three decimal places. If you drop too far below that, you might not find yourself between the pipes for very much longer.