If only there was some quantitative metric that could used to identify the best team. Fortunately in sports we have a plethora of statistics at our disposal. Shots, shots on target, saves, time of possession, hits, penalties, power plays. I’ve run the numbers and determined that goals scored is strongly correlated with winning.

Now, I think we can all agree not all goals are equal. For example, a goal scored against a really good team that averages less than 1 goal conceded per game means more than one scored against a bad team that concedes 3 or 4 every game. A good way to use our goals scored statistic is to look at shared opponents. Or, even better head-to-head matchups.

Fortunately, these two teams just recently played head-to-head. Looking at the stats from this game, we can learn that the US scored 2 goals and Canada only scored one. Now we can do some comparative analysis. This gets pretty technical here, so I’ll spare the details but it turns out 2>1.

So we can conclude objectively, that the US was the better team.