The Latvian hockey community and hockey experts have already gilded the official statistics provided by the IIHF. It’s time for me to find so-called micromachine points. It was once popularized in Riga’s “Dynamo” by Viktor Tikhonov, Ēvalds Grabovskis and Vladimirs Jurzinovs. In later years, the coaches of the Latvian national team also liked to use these tricks. What could be more objective than goals scored and lost by the team while each player is on the pitch? If you are the majority shooter, score, if the shooter is in the minority it plays 0:0! The greatest value is that my five threw more than left.

Watching the numbers in such an order opens up a very interesting picture. Those who are officially the so-called leaders are not like that at all. First of all, it applies to the first three attackers as a whole. What if the three players, for whom head coach Harijs Vītoliņš has planned the biggest jobs, only roll three reels in seven matches? Rūdolfs Balcers needed 14 shots to score three goals, Rodrigo Ābols singled out on 22 shots from Ronalds Ķēniņš on 12 shots to zero. What to ask others if leaders don’t throw.

Less than Latvia (14 goals) in the group tournament of the world championship, only two teams were scored that should have left the elite: Great Britain (10) and Italy (12) and France (11). We had to score 165 times to score 14 goals, that is 8.48%. 10 percent or more is considered normal, but for Germany the figure climbed to 15.38.