Saving an nbt tag or other variable set to a player through death

I am trying to create a mod that will need to track how many times a player has died. I am attempting to use nbt tags to track this, where on player join a value is set, and on each respawn the value is adjusted. But I did not think that an entities data number would be reset when they died. How could I go about saving the deaths counter of the player so it persists through death? I could try and use a global variable to track it, but I am needing this to work in multiplayer with multiple players each with their own death counter. Could I create a "ghost" chest, much like an ender chest that I could assign nbt tags to for each player, but that would create the problem of establishing the name for the tag and it being unique per that player. I am new to mcreator and minecraft modding, so it might be something obvious I could do.