Commissioner's Corner is a place for Commissioner Ryan Donovan to comment on the league, the ACHA, or hockey in general.  If you have any comments or questions you would like to address, please feel free to email him at rdonovan@wccha.com.

I would consider myself a bit of a club hockey nerd.  Outside of the WCCHA, I try to keep tabs on what is going on in the central region and the rest of DII each weekend.  Having played and coached against various DI programs, I enjoy casually following the results from that division as well.  Of course, twitter has become one of the great ways to catch up on final scores.  In particular, @hockey101dotcom posts user submitted scores much like visiting their website, and @achamensd1 does a fantastic job of posting up-to-date scores from that division (the division II version, @achamensd2, unfortunately is not quite as proactive).

However, one thing that has become a pet peeve of mine on the official ACHA DI feed is the way in which certain game scores are noted.  For example, a tweet from last night listed: "Western Michigan 6, Iowa State 3 (empty net goal)".  What you would not see, however, is something along the lines of: "Western Michigan 5, Iowa State 4 (ISU goal w/pulled goalie)".  The latter seems a bit absurd, but we seem to accept the former.  Why is this?  By listing a goal as a empty net goal, are we not giving it less value than any other goal scored?  Are we not unfairly rewarding a team for taking a risk (pulling their goalie) by not giving proper value to the winning team that was playing with one less man?  

If a team wants to take the risk of pulling their goalie in hopes of tying the game with an extra man, they should have to accept the final score without qualifier.  This is particularly true in a situation like the above game, where a team decides to pull a goalie when down by two goals.  If one is willing to take a risk in such an unlikely comeback scenario, the casual observer should be allowed to "punish" the losing team by considering the loss as a comfortable three goal win.  If the losing team is worried about how much worse a three goal loss would look than a two goal loss, that should be part of the consideration in whether to pull the goalie in the first place.

It's time for us to stop looking at scores with such a qualifier, because I worry where such anchoring will lead.  One of the main criteria in ranking consideration is comparative scoring, and such comparison needs to be done on strict scoring - no qualifiers attached.  We don't consider whether a game winning goal was scored on a power play or penalty kill, and more to the point, we don't consider when a game ends in a tie after a pulled goalie leads to a goal.  Such "asterisks" do not exist, and if rankings are to be as transparent and justifiable as possible, we need to eliminate the dreaded "empty net goal" consideration as well.