  Originally devised for baseball, the Pythagorean Won-Loss formula estimates
the percentage of games a team should have won at a particular point in a
season. For decades, this formula had no mathematical justification. In 2006,
Steven Miller provided a statistical derivation by making some heuristic
assumptions about the distributions of runs scored and allowed by baseball
teams. We make a similar set of assumptions about hockey teams and show that
the formula is just as applicable to hockey as it is to baseball. We hope that
this work spurs research in the use of the Pythagorean Won-Loss formula as an
evaluative tool for sports outside baseball.
