Goal passes vs passes preceding goal passes
I started studying if goal passes (from person a to person b), or “leading passes” (the pass from player a to player b, which precedes a goal pass, similar to second assist in ice hockey) are correlated to the numbeor of passes between these players. I started with the final game, and used tools in UCINET (Quadratic Assigment Procedure or somthing along the lines). To my surprise the goal passes had stronger correlation to the distribution of all passes than the “leading passes”. In any case the correlation was not especially strong. The sum of goal and leading passes had a little stronger correlation, which was not a big surprise as this way I was comparing bigger chunck of the passes to the all passes of the game. I will post the numbers of this analysis over the whole tournament as soon as I get that done (probably tomorrow).