Brodeur is a Fraud

Vezina Trends

2012-01-17T16:00:00.000-05:00

"First, he leads the NHL in the one stat that trumps all others: wins." (Scott Burnside, ESPN)

Going after Scott Burnside on goalie analysis is not dissimilar to shooting fish in a barrel, but my real beef is with how he is parroting the conventional wisdom that people within hockey consider wins to be extremely important. It might be Burnside's opinion that wins are the most vital stat, which is obviously misguided but he is allowed to personally believe whatever he wants. The problem is that when he explicitly claims to be handicapping the Vezina race, then at a minimum I would expect that he should be aware of what stats have actually been considered to be important in past voting.

Here is how the last 20 Vezina winners have ranked in five key goalie stats (GVT is Goals Versus Threshold):

Year	Goalie	Sv%	GAA	Wins	SO	GVT
1991	Belfour	1	1	1	2	1
1992	Roy	1	1	3	1	1
1993	Belfour	2	1	2	1	2
1994	Hasek	1	1	6	1	1
1995	Hasek	1	1	5	1	1
1996	Carey	8	1	2	1	7
1997	Hasek	1	2	2	6	1
1998	Hasek	1	4	3	1	1
1999	Hasek	1	1	9	2	1
2000	Kolzig	2	4	3	4	1
2001	Hasek	3	2	3	1	2
2002	Theodore	1	2	14	2	1
2003	Brodeur	11	3	1	1	12
2004	Brodeur	8	2	1	1	9
2006	Kiprusoff	1	1	2	1	1
2007	Brodeur	1	2	1	1	3
2008	Brodeur	3	3	2	9	1
2009	Thomas	1	1	6	10	1
2010	Miller	1	1	4	7	1
2011	Thomas	1	1	9	2	1

Some readily apparent observations from the above table:

1. It is very rare for the consensus best goalie to win the most games. Only 4 of the last 20 Vezina winners led the league in wins. In contrast, for each of the other four stats, the Vezina winner was more likely to lead the league than not. Wins are in fact easily trumped by save percentage, GAA, shutouts, and GVT.

2. The data suggests that the emphasis on shutouts may be decreasing as well, although that could just be variance.

3. The 1996, 2003 and 2004 decisions stand out quite starkly relative to the others. The unwillingness of voters to rank non-playoff goalies as the best in the league was a big factor in the '96 and '04 votes, which is at least somewhat understandable although I disagree with the logic. That leaves the '03 Vezina as the most unusual result of the last two decades. Voters overlooked a playoff goalie that had 1-1-10-5-1 ranking based on the above table, a pattern that much more closely matches the overall averages than that year's winner.

4. The historical pattern that goalies require an excellent GAA to win a Vezina has continued. I would suggest that a low GAA on a strong defensive team seems to be the biggest source of error in the current voting, as those goalies appear on ballots much more frequently than average goalies that rack up a lot of wins on strong offensive teams.

Grant Fuhr and Effort

2012-01-10T07:30:00.000-05:00

One of the things people like to say about goalies on dynasty teams is that they didn't try as hard when it didn't matter, and as a result their stats were understated. I think the evidence generally suggests that while there are some score effects from changing team strategies, goalies usually do try to keep the puck out of the net at all times. With only 30 starting jobs available goalie competition is fierce, which makes less likely that goalies would be willing to slack off while in the game. Even good teams have to fight to make the playoffs these days (see the '10-11 Chicago Blackhawks as an example), which means that there can be major team consequences for a netminder with a habit of trying to coast though a game here or there. Finally, in today's low-scoring environment there is not a lot of garbage time so goals against in blowouts simply will not have a material impact on a goalie's stats.

However, while those things may be true at the moment, they don't necessarily apply to results from several decades ago where the competitive balance and scoring level was much different than it is in today's salary capped NHL. I do think it is probably worth checking truly dominant teams to see whether there are some kind of unusual effects at play, since the incentives for players on those teams are not exactly the same as they are for everyone else.

For example, I suspect that some members of the 1980s Edmonton Oilers may not have been playing much of a 200 foot game during the second half of the regulation schedule during the peak of their dynasty simply because they were already dozens of points in front of everyone else in the standings. With 16 of 21 teams making the playoffs in those days, there was really nothing to left to do by that point in the season other than pad their offensive stats while trying to stay healthy and in good shape for another attempted Cup run.

From 1983-84 to 1987-88 (numbers from the Hockey Summary Project and Hockey Reference), there is a noticeable downward trend in Grant Fuhr's save percentages by month as the season wore on:

Oct: 1121 SA, .898
Nov: 1288 SA, .889
Dec: 1181 SA, .870
Jan: 1286 SA, .890
Feb: 1128 SA, .871
Mar: 1158 SA, .880
Apr: 232 SA, .871

It could be argued that Fuhr was experiencing fatigue, but that seems unlikely as a factor (other than potentially in 1987-88 when he played in 75 games) because he was usually used in a platoon scenario together with Andy Moog. On top of that, Fuhr's numbers jumped back up again to October levels as soon as the playoffs started.

To summarize:

Oct-Jan: 4876 SA, .887
Feb-Apr: 2518 SA, .875
Playoffs: 2268 SA, .899

By the end of January, the Oilers were always sitting very comfortably in the standings.

1983-84: 38-9-5, 41 pts ahead of 5th
1984-85: 36-9-6, 45 pts ahead of 5th
1985-86: 36-11-5, 40 pts ahead of 5th
1986-87: 34-14-11, 36 pts ahead of 5th
1987-88: 29-17-7, 26 pts ahead of 5th

The only season the Oilers were not ranked first overall in the league was 1987-88, where they sat in third place but were still far above the playoff cut line. In all five seasons the team had more wins at the end of January than the last place team in their division would finish with at the end of the season, meaning they could have lost every game they played after January 31 and still made the playoffs. In short, the Oilers had very little to play for as a team from February onwards in any of those seasons.

Looking at Andy Moog's monthly numbers, there is some reason to believe that the rest of the team was having a big impact on the late-season statistical slide:

Andy Moog, 1983-84 to 1987-88:
Oct-Jan: 3363 SA, .890
Feb-Apr: 1572 SA, .876
Playoffs: 343 SA, .866

Moog showed a very similar save percentage decline, suggesting that the Oilers as a group were less committed defensively once they had the division well locked up. Either that or Moog and Fuhr both had a similar lack of focus late in the season when the games became less meaningful. However, given that the two were mostly alternating starts, and were at least in some level of competition for the starting job come playoff time, I would guess that team defence may have been a more significant factor than the effort level of each individual goaltender.

I think there is a reasonable argument to be made that Grant Fuhr's true talent in terms of save percentage was understated by his regular season numbers in the mid-1980s. From 1983-84 to 1987-88, his overall regular season save percentage was .884, a decent mark given the league average of .876 over the same period of time. However, if his February to April numbers are excluded as not being representative of a team giving 100% defensive effort in front of him, with his playoff numbers substituted instead, Fuhr's save percentage would jump to .891, nearly doubling his advantage relative to league average. That rate would also rank Fuhr up near the top of the league over that period of time, rather than merely the upper middle of the pack.

It is still worth pointing out that Moog would be at .888 based on the same assumptions. That suggests that Edmonton's shot quality against was probably not nearly as bad as some suggest, at least when the team felt the game mattered and wanted to play defence, although Moog was an above-average goalie in his own right.

Other goalies may have suffered slightly from this effect as well during the unbalanced '80s, but it seems likely that it would have had the biggest impact in Edmonton given their prolific offence and incredible team success. Fuhr may still be a bit overrated by some fans who rate him as one of the main keys to the Oilers' championships, but this is at least some evidence that supports the contention that he had Hall of Fame talent in his prime.

Anything Can Happen in One Game

2012-01-04T13:30:00.001-05:00

As Canadian world junior fans learned yet again yesterday, anything can happen in a one game playoff. By now the more reactionary fans are well into their usual routine of blaming the goalie and/or the coaching staff, but all that really needs to be said is that the format of international tournaments works against the best teams and creates a high degree of randomness. The recent history of world junior and Olympic tournaments speaks to that, with some of the huge upsets that have taken place, together with the oft-repeated story of teams that looked like world-beaters through four or five preliminary games (as Canada did in this year's tournament), before unexpectedly falling to an inferior foe because of one bad outing in an elimination game (and as far as poor games go, it's certainly possible to do much, much worse than outshooting the opposition 56-24).

The international tournament format caused me to think of an interesting hypothetical: What if the NHL postseason was a series of one-and-done showdowns? Obviously it's not possible to replay those postseasons based on that counterfactual, but it is possible to just look up the results for the first game of each playoff series. It's not a given that things necessarily would have turned out the same way if both teams knew it was do-or-die, but it's probably a fairly reasonable approximation.

It turns out that having a single game elimination format would almost completely alter NHL history. Out of the last 22 Stanley Cup champions, only one of them never found themselves trailing 1-0 in a series at any point in their postseason run. The 2008 Detroit Red Wings are the only Cup winner to win all of their series openers in a single playoff season since Edmonton traded Wayne Gretzky. Every other Cup champion since then lost an opening game, meaning that if they were playing a one game series they would have been eliminated and would never have earned the chance to drink from Lord Stanley's mug.

It would have been a similar story, although not quite as extreme, if all series had been best-of-three affairs. In that scenario, the clear majority of winning teams would still probably not have made it all the way through to win as they did. Fifteen out of the 22 teams lost 2 out of the first 3 games in at least one series on their way to a Cup. Even if the format was changed to a best of 5, that would still have a major impact on the final results, as somewhat amazingly half of the eventual champions trailed 3-2 after five games at some point during their Cup run.

In total, based on these assumptions, Cup winning teams since 1988-89 would have won 61.4% of one game playoffs, 76.1% of three game playoffs, and 87.5% of five game playoffs.

That supports the obvious fact that the larger the sample size, the more likely it is for talent to win out over luck. At the world juniors, it's obvious that Canada routinely has the most talent. Over the past five tournaments, Canada has a record of 26-5 with a goal differential of 185-65. Some portion of that is from pounding on the minnow nations, but even against the traditional top five hockey nations (USA, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Czech Republic) Canada still went 15-5. That's a .750 winning percentage, and the goal differential suggests that the team's record was fully earned (the Canadian juniors scored 99 and allowed 56 against the same opponents for a Pythagorean expected winning percentage of an even slightly better .758).

That's an incredibly dominant record, but it still leaves the simple reality that if Canada is a 75% favourite in back-to-back playoff games against two solid opponents, that still leaves them with only about a 56% chance to win any given tournament. Given the talent of some of the American, Russian and Swedish squads in recent years, that's almost certainly overstating the odds of even a truly dominant team getting through two single elimination contests unscathed. The odds drop even further if the team did not secure a quarterfinal bye by finishing first in their pool.

This is not a simple attempt to justify a loss. Winning a single elimination tournament is also less meaningful, for the exact same reasons. Sometimes a weaker team wins, sometimes a good team plays poorly but gets the breaks anyway. The longer the series, the less variance and the more confidence that the better team ends up triumphant. All Canadian hockey fans would like to claim that the 2010 Olympics win proved that Canada is the world's best hockey nation, for example, but that tournament alone is not enough to prove that assertion. A better argument would be to look at Canada's overall record in winning three of the last six best-on-best tournaments, but even that analysis would show that it is relatively close between the top nations. At the end of the day, many Canadian fans need to have more reasonable expectations about how much success to demand from the teenagers representing their country internationally.

The international format is what it is, it's certainly exciting and it's not going away any time soon, but it's still important to not try to draw too much significance from such a short tournament. If you are tempted to do so, just remember that if the same rules applied to the NHL playoffs, a different team would probably end up winning well over 90% of the time.

40 Year Old Goalies

2012-01-03T08:00:00.001-05:00

There was a discussion in the comments to a post over at Arctic Ice Hockey a couple of weeks ago about whether Tampa's goaltending (current team mark: .896) will regress back towards league average over the rest of the season. Over time goalie save percentages will nearly always move towards a goalie's career average. At the moment, Mathieu Garon is playing at close to his established level (.907 this season, .904 career) while Dwayne Roloson's seasonal rate is well below his career mark (.883 and .909 respectively). It looks like it is reasonable to expect major improvement from Roloson, which should boost Tampa's numbers the rest of the way.

However, while I am confident that Tampa's team save percentage will continue to move upwards towards league average, I do not believe this will be because Roloson's numbers will get a whole lot better. It will instead occur as the team shifts more playing time to Garon, who started 11 games to Roloson's two during the month of December, or perhaps through bringing in another goaltender if GM Steve Yzerman decides to address his team's crease situation. Roloson's numbers will probably improve, if nothing else playing in more of a backup role against weaker opponents may help slightly, but the reasonable expectation is that at 42 years old he is simply too old to expect him to produce anything north of .900.

Looking at the career records of goalies in the save percentage era past the age of 40, it is impressive how much the top two on the list stick out both in terms of quantity and quality of performance:

Hasek: 3366 shots, .914

Roloson: 3602 shots, .907

Everyone else: 4899 shots, .891

Hasek and Roloson each have two of the top four seasons among the 40+ crowd. Other than them, Ed Belfour is the only one who managed to keep his starting job past the age of 40, although his numbers were much lower. Everyone else had numbers that were below league average, in most cases well below.

1. Hasek, 2005-06: 43 GP, .925

2. Roloson, 2010-11: 54 GP, .914

3. Hasek, 2006-07: 56 GP, .913

4. Roloson, 2009-10: 50 PG, .907

5. Joseph, 2007-08: 9 GP, .906

6. Belfour, 2006-07: 58 GP, .902

7. Hasek, 2007-08: 41 GP, .902

8. Burke, 2006-07: 23 GP, .901

9. Belfour, 2005-06: 49 GP, .892

10. Roloson, 2011-12: 17 GP, .882

11. Joseph, 2008-09: 21 GP, .869

12. Esposito, 1983-84: 18 GP, .859

Based on those comparables, a good bet on Roloson's current save percentage talent is probably in the .895-.900 range, although with perhaps 15-20 starts remaining Roli's actual performance could still vary quite widely.

Assuming Garon keeps up his current level of performance and keeps getting the majority of the starts, Tampa's save percentage will probably improve by something like .010 the rest of the way. For example, if Garon keeps his .907 through the end of the season while Roloson plays at .895 and the shot split between them moves from the current 57/43 to 67/33, the Lightning should end up with a save percentage of .903 over their last 50 games. That's still well below league average, which is why the team should certainly consider making a move if they want to make a stronger playoff push this season. History suggests their current goaltending will be unable to perform at a league average level, which will make it difficult for the Lightning to catch up in the standings.

Good Enough to Win

2011-12-31T08:00:00.000-05:00

One thing that is often discussed about goalies by hockey fans is whether they are "good enough" to win a Stanley Cup. This is usually based on things like gut feel and extrapolating huge amounts of significance from small sample sizes; I have rarely seen anyone try to quantify what good enough to win a Cup actually means.

First of all, winning is obviously a team result. The talent and luck necessary for a goalie to win a Cup on the Detroit Red Wings is a lot different than what is required on the New York Islanders. The historical record shows that only strong regular season teams win Cups, so we need to look at the kind of numbers goalies put up on those teams. That said, hot goaltending does have an impact. At some point even a good team is going to run against other strong opponents in their quest for the Cup, and in those games superior goaltending can become a tiebreaking factor (e.g. the 2011 Cup Finals).

Here are the save percentages for each Cup-winning goalie in the save percentage era, adjusted to league average and normalized to the current average save level (.911):

1984: Grant Fuhr, .933

1985: Grant Fuhr, .925

1986: Patrick Roy, .946

1987: Grant Fuhr, .932

1988: Grant Fuhr, 913

1989: Mike Vernon, .930

1990: Bill Ranford, .934

1991: Tom Barrasso, .937

1992: Tom Barrasso, .926

1993: Patrick Roy, .945

1994: Mike Richter, .933

1995: Martin Brodeur, .934

1996: Patrick Roy, .931

1997: Mike Vernon, .932

1998: Chris Osgood, .923

1999: Ed Belfour, .933

2000: Martin Brodeur, .933

2001: Patrick Roy, .940

2002: Dominik Hasek, .923

2003: Martin Brodeur, .936

2004: Nikolai Khabibulin, .933

2006: Cam Ward, .928

2007: J.S. Giguere, .927

2008: Chris Osgood, .932

2009: Marc-Andre Fleury, .911

2010: Antti Niemi, .910

2011: Tim Thomas, .939

Those numbers are quite consistent. Twenty out of 27 goalies had an adjusted save percentage between .923 and .937. The average was .930 on 582 shots against. The only goalies to win the Cup with average save numbers were Fuhr in 1988, Fleury in 2009 and Niemi in 2010. Patrick Roy was the only Cup winning goalie to record a number of .940 or better, which remarkably he managed to do in each of his three Conn Smythe winning performances.

The overall averages for Cup Finalists were very similar, with an average of .927 on 572 SA. The distribution was different however. Eight of 27 had an adjusted save percentage of .939 or better, which reflects the fact that there have been a number of weaker teams that needed strong goaltending just to make it to the Final. Eight other Finalists had adjusted save percentages of .917 or worse. Some of those simply benefitted from strong teammates, while others were mostly good for three rounds and then saw their numbers nosedive as results starting going against them during the Finals.

This analysis gives the rough historical rule of thumb that to win a Stanley Cup, you need a goalie capable of putting up a .930 save percentage over 600 shots. That level of statistical performance doesn't guarantee a Cup, a number of goalies have played at an even higher level than that only to see their teams fall short at the final hurdle, but it makes a ring very possible if other variables (scoring, defence, injuries, opposition, etc.) also happen to break right.

Because of variance, nearly any goalie who makes it to the NHL could put up a .930 on 600 shots with enough luck, although it is not very likely to happen for a replacement level goaltender. According to the binomial probability function, a .900 talent goaltender would have a 0.7% chance of putting up that target number on any given 600 shot stretch. That means that even if they saw 600 shots against in every playoff season, they would still need to play in 99 of them to have a greater than 50% chance of going over .930 in one of them. Unless they happen to be astronomically lucky or find themselves playing for a complete powerhouse, I think it is fair to say that in general a .900 talent goalie is not good enough to win a Stanley Cup.

For a .905 goalie, the odds increase to 1.9%, still not even once every 20 times which is the usual cutoff point to determine statistical significance. The point where the probability moves above 5% is when the goalie's talent is .911, which is right about league average. The chances are much greater for one of the league's elite goalies. A .920 talent goalie would play at .930 or better over 600 shots about 20% of the time.

That shows that a top goalie on a contending team would have a reasonably good chance to win a Cup, but that it is still far from a sure thing. Goalies have short careers and often only a short window of opportunity to compete in the playoffs with a true contender. That is why it is not surprising that some elite goalies who conclusively proved their talent over hundreds of regular season games still never managed a deep playoff run. It was not because they weren't good enough to win a Cup, it was because they didn't get the breaks that are required to win a championship.

The idea that most starting goalies in the league are capable of .930 over 600 shots is also backed up by the actual statistical record. There are only seven teams who do not currently employ a goaltender that has put together at least one stretch of consecutive games with a save percentage of .930 or better on at least 600 shots against since 2009-10. Even among those seven, five of them have goalies who very narrowly missed the cutoff:

Reimer, Toronto: .929 on 622 SA

Theodore, Florida: .929 on 608 SA

Lehtonen, Dallas: .929 on 581 SA

Varlamov, Colorado: .931 on 563 SA

Brodeur, New Jersey: .929 on 603 SA

Some might quibble with the relatively unproven Reimer or Varlamov, or even the aging Brodeur, but I'll count all five as being close enough. That leaves just Columbus and Tampa Bay. Steve Mason's best stretch since '09-10 was .923 on 571 shots, while Roloson's best in the last two and a bit regular seasons was .926 on the same 571 SA. However, these numbers are from the regular season only; if playoff numbers count then from March 29 to May 19 Roloson had a .931 on 623 shots against.

Despite his hot spring last year, I think Roloson's age makes it unlikely that he will regain that form, and Mason's recent track record is simply not very good at all. I think it is probably fair to say that the Blue Jackets and Lightning may not currently have goaltending that is good enough to win a Cup. Other than that, every other team has a goaltender that has shown they can play at a high enough level for a long enough period of time that while they may not be a good bet to provide that level of goaltending during a playoff run, they would at least have an outside chance at winning a Cup if they were fortunate enough to be a member of a contending team.

This discussion should make it quite clear that evaluating a goalie's ability to win a Cup based on their past history is a woefully inadequate method. Nearly every starting goalie in the league is good enough to win a Cup in the right situation, and for a typical playoff team any netminder that is average or better should probably be considered good enough to win if they can just get on a hot streak at the right time. However, in any individual playoff season the odds would still be very much against them, even for an elite goalie on a contending team.

The only caveat to this analysis is that it seems likely that the threshold for a Cup winning goalie has dropped even further since the lockout. As Copper 'n Blue pointed out recently, there haven't exactly been huge gains in parity even with the salary cap system. As a result, goaltending performance has become less decisive than in previous seasons. Four out of six post-lockout goalies have been below .930, with two of them well below that mark. The numbers have dropped for Cup Finalists as well, who have averaged .923 since 2006. I'd estimate that the threshold is probably closer to .925 than .930 in today's NHL, which would leave only Columbus as a team without a goalie with the proven ability to perform above that level.

The Value of a Quick Start

2011-12-20T18:30:00.000-05:00

I was one of a number of hockey observers who thought that by this point in time Jonathan Bernier would have mounted a serious challenge for the Los Angeles' Kings starting job, if not taken it over outright from Jonathan Quick. However, there hasn't been much of a goalie controversy at all, and there is no doubt that the 3rd round pick from Connecticut is the currently the clear #1 ahead of the highly-touted first-rounder from Quebec.

Is Quick a better goalie than Bernier? At the moment that seems obvious, based on their play over the last season and a bit and the way the team has distributed the playing time between them. However, it should be noted that Quick has a significant advantage in the battle between the two young goalies, having been born two years earlier. At the moment, Quick is 25 and Bernier is 23. For the sake of comparison, Jaroslav Halak was 25 and Carey Price was two months away from turning 23 when Montreal made the controversial move to trade their 2010 playoff hero away at the end of the postseason and bet on their younger goaltender. Quick is considerably more experienced, with an extra 180 regular season and playoff games in the NHL under his belt. That raises the reasonable question of whether Quick is the better goalie, or whether he is merely the more developed talent for the moment.

In addition to being a higher draft pick, Bernier had also had a better minor league career. If you compare the two of them by age, Bernier's progression was well ahead of Quick's through his early twenties.

At 19, Quick was still in high school, although he put up very good numbers. Bernier was recognized as one of the best goaltenders in the CHL, made the Kings out of camp and ended up with a brief cup of coffee in the NHL (4 games), before joining Manchester at the end of his junior season and starting 3 out of the team's 4 games in the AHL playoffs. Bernier also made Canada's under-20 national team for the world junior championships, while Quick was not selected to Team USA.

For his age 20 season, Quick went to UMass, where he would spend two seasons. At 20, Bernier was already a solid pro, posting a .914 save percentage in 54 games played as an AHL starter. The next year Bernier was even better with a spectacular .937 save percentage in 74 regular season and playoff games, earning the AHL's top goaltender award.

At the age of 22, Bernier joined the NHL seemingly for good as the Kings' backup goalie. He did fairly well as a backup (.913 in 25 games), although he didn't exactly take the league by storm as he had in the AHL. Compare that to Quick, who turned pro for his age 22 season which he split between the ECHL (38 GP, .905) and AHL (19 GP, .922), plus a trio of brief appearances in the NHL.

To summarize:

19: Quick in high school, Bernier AHL playoff starter
20: Quick in NCAA, Bernier AHL starting goalie
21: Quick in NCAA, Bernier AHL goaltender of the year
22: Quick ECHL starter/AHL backup, Bernier NHL backup

Up to that point in their careers, Bernier's development was clearly surpassing Quick's. However, things turned around in their age 23 seasons. Quick started the year in the AHL, but was called up to Los Angeles in December. When he arrived he made the most of his chance, playing very well early on in stopping 94.6% of the shots against and recording two shutouts in his first six starts. With Erik Ersberg and Jason LaBarbera both playing poorly, Quick ended up quickly taking over the Kings' starting job. Over the remaining 37 games he would play in that season, Quick's save percentage was .909, almost exactly league average (.908).

In his 23 year old season, Bernier also managed to record pretty average numbers in the NHL (.913 in 25 games), but he started very slow, losing 5 of his first 7 starts with a mere .889 save percentage. Bernier's early season struggles were magnified by the fact that Quick did very well out of the gate in the same 2010-11 season (7-1-0, 1.84, .936 in October of 2010), further solidifying his claim to the starting job.

This season Quick yet again began red-hot, going 6-1-2, 1.52, .947 in October, before quite naturally tailing off a bit since November 1. That was the third time in the last four NHL seasons that Quick was almost unbeatable in the first month he played, leading to some fairly extreme splits for his young career: so far:

Quick since 2008-09:
First month played: 23-8-4, 2.02, .928
Rest of season: 89-74-12, 2.72, .911

Compare that to Bernier, who for the second year in a row is off to a slow start.

First 7 games in 2010-11: 2-5-0, 3.30, .889
Remainder of 2010-11: 9-3-3, 2.13, .923
First 7 games in 2011-12: 2-4-0, 3.10, .883

Games at the start of the season often take on extra significance because they help establish a team's pattern of distributing starts between their goaltenders and the impact on a goalie's seasonal statistics is more noticeable. Look at how many fans around the league were either pronouncing their team's #1 as a Vezina candidate in November because of a strong early run of form or were panicking because their team's goalie took a while to discover their usual game. A hot or cold start takes longer to average out, whereas a slump in February or March has much less of an effect on a goalie's seasonal numbers to date because they may already have 40-50 games played by that point in the season.

The first few games can also be quite critical in terms of establishing a reputation for a young goalie trying to crack the NHL. It took all of five Jon Quick starts in 2008 before Los Angeles traded Jason LaBarbera to Vancouver and pretty much anointed Quick the starter. If those early starts had included a couple of blowout losses, then the team may very well have decided that LaBarbera wasn't actually that bad after all while Quick was in need of more seasoning in the minors. There is no doubt that Quick's hot streaks were almost perfectly timed to advance his career. The only way he could have timed them any better was if he managed to get on a real roll in the postseason.

I think there is a fair chance that Quick and Bernier are not that far apart in true talent, even disregarding the age gap between them. In the AHL, Quick put up a .923 on 1033 shots, while Bernier recorded a .928 on 3937 shots. Minor league success does not always translate to the big leagues, but it is at least evidence that the two were in a similar ballpark, even though Bernier was doing it at a younger age.

In the NHL, Quick's career regular season save percentage is .914 compared to Bernier's .906. However, if we exclude Bernier's four games at age 19, where he quite naturally struggled like the majority of teenagers do in the NHL at that age, and we add playoff numbers to increase the sample size, suddenly the career NHL save percentages for the two goalies converge quite a bit:

Quick: .913 on 6026 SA
Bernier: .911 on 925 SA

Quick's sample size is much larger, which means we are far more confident in our estimate of his true talent level. In addition, given that the majority of goalies are below average, it is safest to assume that a young goalie who hasn't proven much in the NHL is below average until he has faced a few thousand shots against. Bernier's pre-NHL track record makes it somewhat more likely that he is a real talent, but it is best to remain conservative at this point. Nevertheless, I will be very interested to revisit these numbers after the end of this season to see if they remain similar.

One thing that could be argued in Quick's favour is that his numbers have been trending upward over the last three seasons. However, I'm not sure how much to credit him for that given that his improvement has come almost entirely on the penalty kill.

2008-09: .926 EV, .869 PK
2009-10: .919 EV, .853 PK
2010-11: .921 EV, .903 PK
2011-12: .928 EV, .922 PK

Quick is a better goaltender today than he was in 2008-09, but he has also probably been very lucky on his last 435 shots against while shorthanded as .910 is an unsustainable PK SV%. For comparison's sake, Bernier's career numbers are .916 at EV and .890 on the PK (again, excluding his 19-year old season). Bernier may also have gotten a bit of luck on special teams, or perhaps the Kings' penalty kill has been unusually strong as of late, although his PK sample size is very small.

Looking at the progression and career numbers of the two young Kings goaltenders, it is hard not to wonder about the size of the impact of hot starts as well as Quick's opportunity to compete for the starting job in 2008-09 while there was not already an established starter, when Quick's two year head start in terms of age really turned into an advantage. Bernier is currently on pace to end his age 23 season with a career total of 49 games played. Jonathan Quick got into 116 of them in his age 23 and 24 seasons while competing mostly against Erik Ersberg, who was probably never more than a replacement level goaltender. Even if he starts playing better than Quick right now, Bernier will probably never get anywhere near that much playing time over this season and next.

If the crease didn't open up for Quick and he didn't have hot starts to begin nearly every season, it is certain that he would have played in fewer games, potentially many fewer games. The Kings brought Bernier along slowly, and it is possible that his development may have stalled somewhat given his infrequent usage as a backup goalie this season and last, whereas Quick went from an AHLer to an NHL starter in one season, and as a result his extra games played in the show at age 23 and 24 were likely very significant in helping him close the early career development gap against his teammate. That said, it is also possible that Bernier was never going to fulfill his earlier promise anyway. Even highly rated draft picks sometimes don't pan out.

This comparison reminds me of an article I wrote a while back which discusses the impact of opportunity on another Kings goalie, Jamie Storr. Storr was sort of the anti-Quick in that he was never able to put together a good run when it seemed like the starting job was available to be won, even though his overall save numbers were actually pretty good.

It's always hard to separate talent and luck early in a young goalie's career, when we really don't know enough about them to properly assess their true ability at the NHL level. Right now Quick is solidly ahead of Bernier, but has that been because of talent or opportunity? It may never be possible to figure that out with any degree of confidence, but the years ahead will give some additional information that will help make a more accurate estimate. For now, I certainly wouldn't rule out the possibility that Bernier is either as good Quick right now or that he will still eventually turn out to be better when both are in their primes. Los Angeles may be facing a Halak/Price type of decision at the end of next season when both goaltenders become free agents, and it will be interesting to what choice they will end up making.

What Does a Clutch Goaltender Look Like?

2011-12-14T07:00:00.000-05:00

One of the most common goaltending cliches is, "It's not how many saves you make, it's when you make them." Colour commentators tell us this over and over again in their rush to credit goalies for wins or blame them for losses, and many hockey fans agree with them. Not every save is the same, they say. Saves that keep a team in the game or allow them to hold on to the lead are more important, and what happens when the game is already decided really doesn't matter so much.

Following that logic, a clutch goalie will make a higher percentage of saves when the score is close, giving their team a "chance to win". As such, we would expect them to have much better numbers in close games than in garbage time.

After the 2011 postseason, I don't think the people saying this kind of stuff really believe what they are saying. Either that or they simply don't recognize it when they see it. The reason for that claim is simply this: Strictly based on the above definition of clutch play (a goalie who performs better when the score is close than when it isn't), I doubt there are many goalies who have ever had more "clutch" numbers over the course of a single playoffs than Roberto Luongo in 2011. Yet, needless to say, Luongo didn't exactly get a whole lot of praise as someone who "made the key saves at the key times."

First, let's look at Luongo's stats at the series level:

Series tied: 7 wins, 1 loss, 0.97 GAA, .968 save %

VAN up 1: 6 wins, 4 losses, 2.56 GAA, .909 save %

VAN up 2+: 2 wins, 5 losses, 4.59 GAA, .868 save %

The Canucks never trailed in any series throughout the playoffs, and a big reason for that was their ridiculous goal prevention record when a series was tied. Luongo was particularly sharp in opening games, posting 3 shutouts in 4 tries.

On the other hand, when the Canucks went well out ahead of their opponents in the series they repeatedly suffered meltdowns. That's not particularly admirable, but the same logic that rates some saves are more key than others could be applied to rate some games as more important than others. And, if you do that, then any reasonable definition of those "key games" would have to include games where the series was tied, since a team that always wins when the series is tied could never be eliminated.

For the sake of comparison, here are Tim Thomas' numbers:

Series tied: 7-4, 1.39, .955

BOS up 1: 1-3, 3.11, .909

BOS up 2+: 2-0, 1.00, .967

BOS down 1: 4-2, 2.84, .921

BOS down 2+: 2-0, 1.50, .961

With the series tied or their teams up one game, Luongo's numbers were better than Thomas'. The main difference was that Thomas was great at closing out the Flyers series and he was also great in the two games where the Bruins faced 0-2 deficits.

Let's move on to the game level. Here are Luongo's numbers broken down by game score:

Lead by 5: 0 saves, 1 shot, .000 save %

Lead by 4: 0 saves, 1 shot, .000 save %

Lead by 3: 18 saves, 19 shots, .947 save %

Lead by 2: 56 saves, 60 shots, .933 save %

Lead by 1: 154 saves, 164 shots, .939 save %

Tie game: 257 saves, 276 shots, .931 save %
Down by 1: 84 saves, 92 shots, .913 save %

Down by 2: 24 saves, 32 shots, .750 save %

Down by 3: 41 saves, 45 shots, .911 save %

Down by 4: 14 saves, 17 shots, .824 save %

Down by 5: 2 saves, 3 shots, .667 save %

Down by 6: 0 saves, 1 shot, .000 save %

What's obvious from that chart? If the game was close, Luongo made a high percentage of the saves. But if it was a blowout, then everything went in. Down by 2 or more goals, Luongo had an .827 save percentage on 98 shots, which is almost unbelievably bad. In garbage time, Luongo made very few saves at all - with either team leading by 4 or more goals, he stopped just 16 out of 23 shots for a mere .696 save percentage. If I was a member of Vancouver's coaching staff, I'd be somewhat concerned by that number and what it could indicate about Luongo's compete level. That said, if it is only "when you make the saves" that counts, then his performance in blowout games should be considered meaningless anyway.

Copper 'N Blue also tracked scoring chances for all of Vancouver's playoff games. Because it is possible for goals to be allowed on non-scoring chances (which Luongo did four times in the Nashville series and six times in the playoffs overall), I calculated scoring chance save percentage as (scoring chances against minus goals against) divided by scoring chances against.

Lead by 5: 2 chances, 1 goal, .500 save %

Lead by 4: 1 chance, 1 goal, .000 save %

Lead by 3: 5 chances, 1 goal, .800 save %

Lead by 2: 29 chances, 4 goals, .862 save %

Lead by 1: 76 chances, 10 goals, .868 save %

Tie game: 127 chances, 19 goals, .850 save %

Down by 1: 50 chances, 8 goals, .840 save %

Down by 2: 19 chances, 8 goals, .579 save %

Down by 3: 26 chances, 4 goals, .846 save %

Down by 4: 5 chances, 3 goals, .400 save %

Down by 5: 2 chances, 1 goal, .500 save %

Down by 6: 1 chance, 1 goal, .000 save %

The numbers are pretty similar, although Luongo's numbers with the lead come down slightly relative to his trailing numbers, likely because of score effects. With the Canucks leading, the opposition took 2.2 shots for every scoring chance recorded. When Vancouver trailed, the ratio dropped to 1.8. Still, the overall conclusion is the same: Luongo's problems were not with the game close or Vancouver in the lead, but rather with the Canucks trailing by more than one goal. And in blowout games he apparently wasn't even trying (7 goals against on 11 scoring chances with either team leading by 4 or more).

Not surprisingly, Vancouver did a lot better in close games than in blowouts. Excluding empty net goals, they were 12-4 in games decided by one goal, 2-0 in games decided by two goals, and 1-6 in games decided by three goals or more.

Having said all that, let's compare Luongo's save percentages by score to those of his Stanley Cup goaltending counterpart, Tim Thomas:

Score within 1 goal: Luongo .931, Thomas .940

Up by 2 or 3 goals: Luongo .937, Thomas .944

Down 2 or 3 goals: Luongo .844, Thomas .957

Luongo was knocked for his ability to hang on to leads, especially during the Nashville series after giving up a couple of late tying goals, but his numbers while leading actually weren't too far off what Thomas was putting up for Boston. With the score close, Thomas again had an edge but not nearly as much as one would think based on their overall numbers. By far the biggest difference in performance between the two goalies was that Luongo was blown out repeatedly and did far worse when his team fell behind by two goals or more.

Did Luongo's awful play in blowouts have much of an effect on Vancouver's win/loss record? Maybe, maybe not. It would certainly be possible to argue that the Canucks would have been unlikely to come back in those situations anyway, especially with how anemic their offence was at times during the playoffs. On the other hand, Boston came back twice from two goal deficits, once again Montreal and once against Tampa Bay. If Thomas hadn't made the saves in those situations, the Bruins would quite possibly have never have made it to the Finals.

To me, the implications of these numbers are pretty clear. On one hand, you can choose to cling to the "key saves at key times", "the only thing that matters is clutch play" logic and praise Roberto Luongo for elevating his game in key situations with the score close in last year's Stanley Cup playoffs. Alternately, you could consider that most of the game is a "key situation", realize that effort and desire don't correlate perfectly with success, and understand that most goalies have the mindset to keep the puck out of the net at all times. That would cause you to reject the "key saves" logic, and instead rate goalies based on their overall performance. In that case, you would be perfectly entitled to knock Luongo's playoff performance, particularly relative to that of Tim Thomas.

That's assuming people are being logically consistent, however. In reality, there isn't an awful lot of logic involved in either hockey fandom or hockey reportage. When most people say "clutch goaltending", they usually simply mean "good goaltending". If not that, then they mean "goaltending behind excellent teammates". Another tactic is to move the goalposts, narrowing the sample size to focus on a few particular games (e.g. game sevens or Stanley Cup Finals games) as the only ones that qualify for the "clutch" distinction. I disagree with that logic since a team that didn't win in the earlier rounds would not have made it to the Finals at all, and similarly without winning three out of the first six no team would still be alive to participate in a game seven.

I've been in the camp that focuses on overall performance all along, so I'm not defending Luongo here. I think that throughout the 2011 playoffs, factoring in both his good and his bad games, Luongo was pretty ordinary. I do think that his play was better in close games, and I'm quite confident that if there was a hockey metric similar to baseball's win probability added, Luongo would rate much better according to that than he would based on overall save percentage. Whether that is a significant observation depends on your perspective on clutch goalies.

At this point I think it's also impossible not to accept the theory that Luongo has a higher-than-normal propensity to melt down when things turn against him. I used to agree with Tyler Dellow that it was essentially media narratives driving the perception, but the repeated blowouts involving Luongo and the above save percentage splits by score make that position tough to hold. I would still argue that Luongo's overall career playoff performance is reasonable relative to his true talent level, but has he ever had some forgettable single game performances on the way.

Dave Bolland and the Percentages

2011-12-08T15:00:00.000-05:00

It's fun early in the season to click around on Behind the Net and look at the huge variation in on-ice shooting percentage and on-ice save percentage for hockey players around the league. For example, Detroit's Drew Miller has a .988 save percentage behind him this season. Matt D'Agostini is at .980, benefitting from Brian Elliott's completely unexpected early season star turn in St. Louis. In San Jose, Martin Havlat and Michal Handzus are at .966 and .964. At the other end of the scale, Ottawa's goalies have been absolutely ventilated (.795) with rookie Stephane DaCosta on the ice, explaining his team-worst -9 rating. Steve Downie, Marty Reasoner, Craig Adams and Matthew Lombardi are other regulars with on-ice save percentages still below .850.

There can be huge differences even between teammates playing in front of the same defencemen and goaltenders. Da Costa's teammate Jesse Winchester has a .940 save percentage behind him, meaning a shot has been 3.4 times more likely to go in the net with DaCosta on the ice than with Winchester. There's obviously no way a forward could have anything even close to that much of an impact on shot quality. It's a similar story in Detroit, where nobody scores with Drew Miller, Cory Emmerton (.955), Darren Helm (.955), or Tomas Holmstrom (.960) on the ice, but perennial Selke nominees Henrik Zetterberg (.891) and Pavel Datsyuk (.904) get lit up. Some small part of that is likely related to quality of competition, but with those kind of ranges and samples it is mostly luck.

The same type of thing can happen over a postseason as well, given that a typical Stanley Cup winner plays 22-26 games, and when it does it becomes more widely noticed and emphasized because the whole hockey world is paying attention. An example of a player who has been absolutely rocking the percentages in the playoffs lately is Chicago's Dave Bolland.

A huge part of both the 'Hawks Cup run in 2010 and their almost-comeback against the Canucks in their first round series in 2011 was the ability of the team's checking line to outscore strong opposition. Bolland attracted a lot of attention for his work, and a good portion of those accolades are indeed deserved. Bolland is a key member of the Blackhawks because of his ability to play tough minutes and has a big impact on Chicago's team depth when he is in the lineup. However, over the last three playoff series he and his linemates were outscoring at a completely unsustainable rate.

Copper 'n Blue counted scoring chances for the Blackhawks' series against San Jose and Philadelphia in 2010, as well as the first round matchup against Vancouver last season. With Bolland on the ice in the 14 games he played over that stretch, Chicago created 49 scoring chances and gave up 69 against at even strength. Given the difficulty of his minutes in terms of opposition and defensive zone starts, that's really not too bad for Bolland and his linemates. The curious part is that at the same time Bolland's plus/minus somehow managed to end up at +13.

Excluding shorthanded and empty net goals, Chicago outscored their opponents 16-5 with Bolland on the ice at even strength. That means the team scored in over 1 of 3 recorded chances (34.8%), while the scoring chance save percentage behind him has been an improbable .922. Depending on who is counting them, typical rates are 1 goal scored per 6 or 7 scoring chances. If you add up those two numbers, you get a way-off-the-charts scoring chance PDO number of 1270.

I often write about how much luck there is in the playoffs, and how randomness plays a big factor in what kind of labels get applied to players. When you have a player who is both playing well and getting lucky it becomes very tough for the opposition to overcome, and perhaps equally tough for sportswriters to avoid hyping up the impact of that particular player. Focusing strictly on results in terms of goals for and against, it is hard to deny that Bolland had a huge impact on the last three series for the Blackhawks. However, the underlying numbers show that it would be virtually impossible for that level of outscoring to continue, as the percentages needed to be extremely skewed in Bolland's favour for the numbers to come out the way they did. I wouldn't bet on his line outscoring Joe Thornton or the Sedins again in their next postseason matchup.

This season, Bolland's percentages have been trending in the exact opposite direction, which explains why he currently sits at -5. Despite facing the highest QualComp on the team and starting in his own zone 33.9% of the time, Bolland manages to almost break even in terms of Corsi and the Hawks have actually outshot their opponents 124-112 with him on the ice at 5 on 5. All that indicates that Bolland is playing extremely well, but unfortunately his PDO so far is just 943, mainly because the save percentage behind him is just .868, and as a result he has been outscored 17-10. In the long run it typically all evens out.

Pekka Rinne Comparables

2011-12-04T10:00:00.000-05:00

Pekka Rinne's 7-year, $49 million extension from the Nashville Predators has been one of the biggest goaltending stories of this season. Before coming to terms on that huge deal, which was announced on his 29th birthday, Rinne had a total of just 188 NHL games played in his young career through the age of 28. There's no denying that Rinne had a great season last year and has been playing well for the most part in 2011-12, but that is still not a huge sample size to make a seven year bet on a goalie's future, particularly with the increased downside risk associated with a big money guaranteed contract in a capped league.

To help project how Rinne might be expected to perform through the entirety of that contract, I looked for other goalies since 1990 with a similar amount of NHL experience at the same age (150-200 games played through their age 28 or age 29 season), and selected only goalies who were starters for the last two or three of those seasons (i.e. goalies who had already peaked and had already become backups or washed out of the league were not included). To adjust for different scoring contexts, I also ran the goals over average numbers (calculated by subtracting league save percentage from each goalie's save percentage and multiplying by the number of shots). This was the career progression of those goalies by age:

25: 346 GP, .906, 30.2 GOA

26: 484 GP, .903, -18.3 GOA

27: 615 GP, .911, 74.3 GOA

28: 579 GP, .909, 40.2 GOA

29: 610 GP, .909, 53.2 GOA

30: 555 GP, .908, 28.6 GOA

31: 474 GP, .905, -20.6 GOA

32: 379 GP, .912, 39.0 GOA

33: 375 GP, .908, -9.3 GOA

34: 298 GP, .905, -35.6 GOA

35: 88 GP, .897, -21.8 GOA

36: 74 GP, .904, 0.1 GOA

Part of the reason for the steep decline in games played is that some of these goalies are still active and have not yet reached their age 36 season. However, the save percentage numbers show how the performance declined in the aggregate, especially from the age of 33 and onwards.

Of the goalies in the sample, four of them were particularly comparable to Rinne in that they had well above average save percentage performance in the three seasons prior to the cutoff. Those four goalies were Marty Turco, Miikka Kiprusoff, Guy Hebert, and Mike Dunham. Here are the same numbers for that quartet:

25: 100 GP, .916, 25.6 GOA

26: 104 GP, .901,-8.4 GOA

27: 108 GP, .918, 76.6 GOA

28: 84 GP, .913, 32.7 GOA

29: 87 GP, .915, 67.1 GOA

30: 120 GP, .913, 63.4 GOA

31: 124 GP, .904, -25.4 GOA

32: 96 GP, .912, 19.2 GOA

33: 132 GP, .908, 3.0 GOA

34: 136 GP, .904, -28.8 GOA

35: 35 GP, .897, -12.5 GOA

Through the age of 30, the four were elite at stopping the puck, worth an average of 2-3 wins each per season compared to an average goaltender. Once they got on the wrong side of 30, however, things went south pretty quickly. From age 31 to 35, they had a combined save percentage of .906, which was a whopping 44.5 goals below league average. Miikka Kiprusoff is still hanging around in Calgary, making $5.8 million per season and seemingly skating by without taking any blame for his declining performance, but the teams employing the other three goalies are no doubt very grateful that they didn't sign any of those goalies to long-term contracts.

That is why the Predators are taking on quite a bit of risk in signing Rinne to a seven year deal. Rinne may be an elite goalie today, but that doesn't guarantee that he will be one at age 32 or 35. Turco and Kiprusoff were once elite as well, both having led the league in save percentage and having been voted a postseason All-Star, and yet that didn't stop them from ending up ranked last and third-last respectively on the list of post-lockout save percentages for goalies with at least 200 games played.

Very few goalies are great throughout their careers. Those that are consistently elite typically break in early, usually taking on significant NHL playing time by the age of 22 or 23. Then again, that is not a hard and fast rule, as sometimes there are late bloomers like Tim Thomas who like Rinne came from relative nowhere to put together a pretty good initial three year run as an NHL starter after the lockout at the age of 31-33 (.914 save percentage). Then, instead of seeing his play decline like many others, Thomas only got better from there, winning the Vezina in two of the next three seasons.

Being from Europe and having less exposure to North American scouts may have contributed to Rinne waiting until his mid-twenties before winning a starting job. Rinne is not the first European netminder in a similar situation; Jonas Hiller had exactly the same number of games played through his age 28 season as Rinne. Hiller has been a quality netminder so far, but it remains to be seen how well he can sustain that level. He has also struggled in the early going this year after an extended absence due to vertigo, which has to be somewhat of a concern. Then again, even in a worst case scenario, Hiller has three years left on his contract at $4.5 million, meaning that Anaheim would have much less of a problem than Nashville if their starting goalie is unable to play up to his usual level.

Looking back six years to 2005-06, only 11 out of 30 starting goaltenders still hold down a #1 role today (and that's counting Brodeur, Khabibulin and Roloson as starters, all of whom may or may not still be in that position at season's end depending on how well they are able to stem the tide of old age). Just six of those 11 are still with the same team (Brodeur, Kiprusoff, Lundqvist, Fleury, Miller, Thomas). Competition for NHL starting jobs is fierce, and the odds are generally against a goalie holding his position for an extended period of time.

In the salary cap era, flexibility is important, and tying up a lot of money in a non-performing asset can be crippling to a team's chances of success. The evidence suggests that paying a goaltender $49 million for 7 years, particularly when that goalie wasn't an NHL starter until the age of 26, is generally not a good bet. Driving Play had it right when they concluded that Rinne would essentially have to surpass all historical comparables to outperform his contract. It is possible that Rinne stays healthy, happy and productive in Nashville, but there are simply so many things that can go wrong that the Predators will probably end up regretting their decision.

Fun With Small Sample Sizes

2011-11-21T08:00:00.000-05:00

I couldn't help but find this amusing, even though it covers just two handfuls of games:

Chris Osgood, career against the Detroit Red Wings:

1 win, 7 losses, 2 ties, 3.35 GAA, .879 save percentage

The Florida Outlier

2011-11-14T19:00:00.000-05:00

In honour of Ed Belfour's Hall of Fame induction, I thought to take a closer look at one of the weirdest single-season statistical anomalies that I can think of since the lockout.

The Florida Panthers have routinely been one of the worst teams in allowing shots against. Over the past seven seasons the team has had consistently good goaltending and consistently bad shot prevention. There was, however, one very large exception. See if you can pick it out:

2003-04: .924 save %, 34.0 SA/60
2005-06: .913 save %, 34.3 SA/60
2006-07: .899 save %, 28.9 SA/60
2007-08: .922 save %, 33.2 SA/60
2008-09: .925 save %, 34.3 SA/60
2009-10: .920 save %, 33.6 SA/60

2010-11: .918 save %, 31.5 SA/60

That raises the intriguing question: Did the lower shot totals in 2006-07 cause the goalies to have a correspondingly lower save percentage? Or was it the lower save percentage in the first place that caused the other team to take fewer shots against? Or were there some other factors at play?

The Panthers' starting goalie that year was Belfour, in the final season of his illustration career. Throughout his career, Eddie the Eagle typically faced fewer shots against than the other goalies that he has played with. Therefore, it seems quite likely that at least some portion of the effect is likely because of him. However, given the numbers through the rest of his career that suggest he prevents about one shot against per game compared to an average goalie, I don't think there is any chance at all that a 41-year old Belfour was able to prevent 4-5 shots per game entirely through his own efforts.

Here are the home/road splits for each goalie for 2006-07 along with the two seasons before and after:

Luongo, '04: 2.55, .926, 34.6 at home, 2.28, .935, 35.3 on road

Luongo, '06: 2.67, .920, 33.3 at home, 3.28, .909, 36.1 on road

Belfour, '07: 2.75, .901, 27.8 at home, 2.80, .903, 28.8 on road

Vokoun, '08: 2.55, .921, 32.2 at home, 2.85, .916, 33.9 on road

Vokoun, '09: 2.21, .933, 32.9 at home, 2.92, .915, 34.3 on road

From those splits it doesn't look like Florida changed their official scorer, as shots went down significantly in all venues.

Looking at the numbers for the backup goalies shows that there was a lot more to it than any individual discrepancies between Belfour and Luongo or Vokoun:

Steve Shields, 2003-04:

Starts: 3-6-1, 3.67, .874, 29.1 SA/60

Non-starts: 0-0-0, 2.37, .904, 24.6 SA/60

Jamie McLennan, 2005-06:
Starts: 2-3-2, 3.71, .895, 35.3 SA/60

Non-starts: 0-1-0, 1.43, .941, 24.4 SA/60

Alex Auld, 2006-07:
Starts: 7-13-5, 3.28, .889, 29.6 SA/60

Non-starts: 0-0-0, 4.55, .857, 31.9 SA/60

Craig Anderson, 2006-07:

Starts: 1-1-1, 2.54, .924, 33.3 SA/60

Non-starts: 0-0-0, 0.00, 1.000, 23.6 SA/60

Craig Anderson, 2007-08:
Starts: 7-5-1, 2.23, .936, 35.0 SA/60

Non-starts: 1-1-0, 2.33, .924, 30.8 SA/60

Craig Anderson, 2008-09:
Starts: 15-7-3, 2.75, .924, 36.0 SA/60

Non-starts: 0-0-2, 2.27, .931, 32.8 SA/60

The special teams numbers don't give much of a hint either, given that Florida had a below-average rate of power play opportunities and a higher-than-average rate of power plays against. Those two factors would typically result in more shots against, rather than fewer. The only major difference in the special teams numbers for '06-07 was the number of shots against per PK:

2003-04: 374 PPOA, 571 SA, 1.53 SA/PP

2005-06: 514 PPOA, 744 SA, 1.45 SA/PP

2006-07: 443 PPOA, 530 SA, 1.20 SA/PP

2007-08: 374 PPOA, 532 SA, 1.42 SA/PP

2008-09: 311 PPOA, 513 SA, 1.65 SA/PP

(PPOA=Power play opportunities against)

Jacques Martin was the coach from 2005-06 to 2007-08, which makes it even more surprising that the numbers would change so suddenly.

Team shots for:

2003-04: 2273

2005-06: 2724

2006-07: 2730

2007-08: 2549

2008-09: 2412

Given that '05-06 was skewed by a high rate of power plays, this suggests that the Panthers were a much better territorial team in '06-07.

Florida had similar personnel in '06-07 compared to '05-06. Jay Bouwmeester was the #1 defenceman and Olli Jokinen was the #1 forward. Nathan Horton (21) and Stephen Weiss (23) both probably took large steps forward in 2006-07, and may have had some impact on turning results around, although the two of them remained in Panther uniforms until 2009-10 while Florida's results dropped back to their usual levels. The defence replaced Sean Hill, Lukas Krajicek and Joel Kwiatkowski with Ruslan Salei, Bryan Allen and Steve Montador, which is probably an upgrade. Still, it remains curious that there was such a huge difference in results. If a personnel change was responsible for the sudden shot drop, why did it reappear again the following season?

Breaking down shots against by period from the Hockey Summary Project, the biggest drop in shots against from '05-06 to '06-07 came in the first period:

First Period: -196 (-20%)

Second Period: -104 (-11%)

Third Period: -113 (-13%)

Overtime: 0 (0%)

I looked at the leading and trailing numbers, and 2006-07 does not appear to be an outlier in that regard. The Panthers may have played a more low-event game early on, suppressing shots against in the first period. However, there was clearly a significant shot prevention effect throughout the entire 60 minutes.

The last thing I thought to look at was blocked shots:

2003-04: 463 home, 549 away, 1012 total

2005-06: 403 home, 454 away, 857 total

2006-07: 501 home, 520 away, 1021 total

2007-08: 410 home, 570 away, 980 total

2008-09: 485 home, 620 away, 1105 total

2009-10: 584 home, 819 away, 1403 total

2010-11: 507 home, 618 away, 1125 total

This may explain some of the effect, perhaps reflecting a strategic shift by the Panthers' defence to adjust for the team's weaker goaltending. There is still a large amount left unexplained, however, as combined blocked shots and recorded shots against still show a drop of about 300 during 2006-07 compared to the seasons before and after.

For what it's worth, given that shot quality measures have tended to be unreliable and not predictive year-to-year (see Gabe Desjardins' summary rant on the subject), Alan Ryder estimated the Panthers' shot quality at 0.957 in 2005-06, 1.014 in 2006-07, and 1.008 in 2007-08 in his annual NHL reviews. Numbers below one indicate easier than average shots against while numbers above one indicate more difficult than average shots. That would support the hypothesis that the Panthers were able to block or prevent more long-range shots in '06-07 compared to '05-06. However, the shot quality estimate was similar in '07-08 compared to '06-07, despite the large increase in shots against.

I still don't entirely know what to make of the Florida's team defensive performance in 2006-07, it looks like a confluence of factors was responsible for the one-year dip in the team's shots allowed. It makes sense that the Panthers would have played more conservatively that year because of the goaltending change, leading to more blocked shots. The metrics suggest that team improved in terms of puck possession and spent more time at the other end of the rink, which helped cut down shots against. Switching goaltenders from Roberto Luongo to Ed Belfour may also have had a shots against impact of 1-2 shots per game. Other contributing factors could have been improved penalty killing as well as facing fewer opposing power plays against as players adjusted to the new post-lockout rules.

Yet while that may account for the changes from '05-06 to '06-07, it still doesn't explain why the Panthers dropped back to their usual awful shot prevention level during '07-08 and following years. It looks like coach Martin and his skaters put everything together for one season, but then for whatever reason were unable to recreate that success. Unfortunately for them, the one season where they managed to put together a pretty strong team effort (.898 win threshold, 13th best in the league) was also the one season where the team's goaltending was poor, and the result was yet another non-playoff appearance for the Florida Panthers.

Why Mike Richter Might Be Overrated

2011-11-07T07:00:00.002-05:00

Mike Richter is a goalie that is remembered pretty fondly by many. That shouldn't be too surprising, as he played a long career on a big market team, he won a Cup, and he represented the U.S.A. admirably in a number of international tournaments. However, looking at his career numbers and especially his Vezina and All-Star voting record makes it pretty clear that Richter was not a member of the goaltending elite. Pretty much the only thing that was elite was his paycheque; in his entire career nobody ever gave Richter a first place vote for the postseason All-Star teams.

I recently realized, however, that Richter may not even have been as good as his numbers suggest. The reason is that there is some evidence that Richter may have benefited from a generous home scorer during the prime of his career in New York. Madison Square Garden has long been known as a rink that produces abnormal statistics for things like shot distance. During the mid-1990s, they might have been recording some screwy numbers when it comes to total shots as well.

For seven consecutive seasons from 1991-92 to 1997-98, Mike Richter's backup goalies faced a higher rate of shots against at home than on the road. Richter faced a higher rate himself in five out of the seven seasons and narrowly missed the two other times, finishing 0.8 lower in '91-92 and 0.5 lower in '97-98. Having a higher rate of shots against at home in any season is relatively rare, given that teams typically play better at home. When it happens seven years in a row, it is a major outlier.

Richter ('92-'98):

Home: 99-60-24, 2.71, .911, 30.5 SA/60

Road: 71-66-13, 3.01, .896, 29.1 SA/60

NYR backup goalies ('92 to '98):

Home: 45-25-18, 2.81, .910, 31.2 SA/60

Road: 47-60-14, 3.01, .894, 28.4 SA/60

The home/road GAA splits are quite normal. The backups had a very skewed record at home vs. on the road, which implies that the Rangers played a lot better in front of them at home. Given that, one would not expect shots against to go up by nearly 3 per game. The only effect that could somewhat account for that would be score effects. The Rangers playing to the score might explain why the backups had more of a differential between home and road than Richter did, but Richter himself had a more typical home/road split yet still had a higher shots against rate at home. Thus it seems that all Rangers goalies were getting extra credit for saves at MSG.

It is at least possible that the Rangers played a very high event game at home, although if that were true it would be expected that the goalie's home save percentages would have dropped or stayed the same rather than rose substantially compared to their numbers on the road.

Richter's numbers at home and on the road were almost identical to those of his backups. For a several of those seasons that was nothing to be ashamed of, as quality veteran John Vanbiesbrouck was Richter's playing partner, but for the rest of it the Rangers had a fairly undistinguished collection of backups, led by Glenn Healy. Healy's numbers cratered once he left the Rangers to play on the Leafs, which probably had a lot to do with age, but may have also had something to do with artificially inflated home numbers.

League average over the period was roughly .898. Richter's overall save percentage checked in at .905, suggesting that he was a pretty valuable goalie, worth nearly two wins above average to his team per season. However, the numbers show that nearly all of his excess value was coming based on the performance he recorded on home ice.

If we assume that in reality Richter faced the same rate of shots against at home and on the road and that the difference was due to generous scorekeeping, his home save percentage would drop to .907 and his overall save percentage for the period would fall to .902. If Richter actually faced one fewer shot against per 60 minutes at home, his numbers would fall even further to .904 at home and .900 overall, a result that would leave him about 20 goals above an average goalie. That's still pretty good, but it would have a pretty dramatic impact on Richter's career numbers. It would cost him about half of his career value in terms of goals above average, causing him to plunge well out of the "decent starters" range on this list.

On the road, Mike Richter was almost exactly an average goalie, based on his save percentage numbers. At home, his numbers were up among the best in the league. Given that the numbers of his backups followed the same pattern, it seems unreasonable to conclude that this was due to anything related to Richter himself. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that the Rangers would have been successfully suppressing shot quality against at least 10% better than an average team while playing at home yet for some reason choosing not to do the same thing on the road. Perhaps there were some team effects, but on the whole it seems like the best explanation is probably that there was some degree of shot padding at Madison Square Garden in the mid-1990s which boosted Mike Richter's statistics.

The Razor-Thin Edge of a Winning Reputation

2011-11-02T07:00:00.001-04:00

If you ask hockey fans who is the best goalie in the league, you'll probably usually hear a handful of names listed before Cam Ward enters the conversation. But ask instead which goalie they would want if they were playing in game 7 of the Cup Finals, and don't be surprised if you'll hear Ward mentioned in the first 2 or 3 names.

Why is that? Simply because Cam Ward has a reputation as a winner. He won a Stanley Cup, he has a Conn Smythe, he's only lost one playoff series in his career. And if you get into an argument with a Hurricanes fan about their goaltender, it usually doesn't take long at all for them to break out Cam Ward's career record in game sevens: 4 wins, 0 losses.

That is an impressive statistic, to be sure, but like any win/loss record it is dependent on Ward's teammates and opponents. The reality is that Cam Ward was very, very close indeed to being 0-2 in his career in game sevens.

In his first career game 7, Ward allowed Jochen Hecht to bank in a shot from behind the net with 5 seconds left in the second period to give Buffalo a 2-1 lead. In the entire 2006 playoffs, teams leading after two periods were 60-9, but Ward's Carolina teammates scored three times in the third to bail out their goaltender and advance to the Cup Final, where the 'Canes again won in seven games.

In 2009, Carolina went to game seven in the first round against New Jersey, and again found themselves trailing in the third period. This time the outlook was even bleaker, with New Jersey leading 3-2 at home with less than 90 seconds remaining before Jussi Jokinen and Eric Staal combined to stun the Devils and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Excluding that game, teams were 59-2 in the 2009 playoffs when leading after two periods, which shows just how miraculous the 'Canes comeback was.

If not for two terrific comebacks, Cam Ward would be 0-2 in game sevens and nobody would have the impression that he was a particularly clutch goalie. That is not to say that Ward had no impact at all in those comebacks; clearly another goal or two against would have made much more difficult for his team to pull off the improbable. Nevertheless, it is an entirely reasonable counterfactual to suggest that with a bit less help Ward could easily have had not just no Cup and no Smythe, but not even a single game seven victory to his credit.

The game seven argument is also fairly meaningless because it represents such a small sample of Ward's career. Win/loss record aside, it is correct to say that Ward has performed well in game sevens (1.85 GAA and .932 save percentage), but we don't have to go very far to find examples of important games where Ward didn't manage to get the job done. Twice he has played the final game of the season in "win and you're in" situations, and both times he gave up four goals in a Hurricanes loss that eliminated them from playoff contention. Ward also gave up five goals in a world championship final loss on Canadian ice in Quebec City in 2008. These performances show that his performances in must-win games are far more variable than the "4-0 in game sevens" narrative implies.

Cam Ward is a very good goalie, and his recent performance has been trending solidly upward (.919 save percentage over the past three seasons). Is he unusually clutch in pressure situations? I think we still have to simply wait and see.

It's Not Only About the Stats

2011-10-31T07:00:00.000-04:00

One of the goalies off to a red hot start this season is Kari Lehtonen (8-1-0, 1.75, .947). Moving to Dallas has rejuvenated Lehtonen's career, and while he obviously won't maintain those lofty numbers for an entire season, the Finnish goalie had a decent year last year and is still only 27 years old. Few people have questioned his talent, but Lehtonen may finally have figured out how to combine that with the hard work and professionalism needed to perform as one of the league's better netminders.

Lehtonen can be used as an example both of the power of statistics and of how other factors can be important beyond the numbers. I touted him for a while prior to his trade to Dallas as a talented NHL goalie who was stuck in a bad situation in Atlanta, based primarily on the strong even strength save percentage results he put up in the early part of his career. However, at the same time observers were pretty much unanimous that Lehtonen was not properly utilizing his talent through a lack of preparation and repeatedly showing up overweight and out of shape, which led to a lot of his injury problems. This year all reports are that Lehtonen has finally put in the off-ice work needed to get into great shape. There is a noticeable difference between what he looks like now and what he looked like when he was playing in Atlanta.

Off-ice training and mental preparation and hours spent on the practice rink working on technique drills are all very important for a top professional goaltender. However, typically goalies who make it to the top levels of the sport have developed the training and work habits they need, especially since for most of them it is a fairly long road to the get to the NHL and if they weren't putting in that time then they would have washed out well before they made it to the show. If everyone is working hard, then it doesn't become much of an advantage for anyone, and it becomes much less likely that a goalie who has been training hard year-round for a number of years will suddenly make a huge leap forward primarily based on those off-ice factors. On the other hand, someone who is very talented but doesn't take the steps to maximize his talent would be a candidate to see his performance improve if he is able to finally put everything together, which may be the case for someone like former second overall pick Kari Lehtonen.

There's always good reason to be skeptical about claims justifying early season success. This is the time of the year where dozens of articles are written by reporters claiming that a good offseason of training is fully responsible for a player's 30% shooting percentage through 10 games, and is the reason why that player is going to hit the 40 or 50 goal mark for the first time in their careers. Needless to say, those players always regress significantly by season's end, as luck was almost certainly a bigger factor than anything that happened in a weight room or on a practice rink. On the other hand, we shouldn't completely dismiss the human factors either. I'm still far from convinced that Kari Lehtonen will end up in Vezina contention, but it will be interesting to see how long he can sustain his sizzling start. At the very least there appears to be a good chance that he is headed for a career year in 2011-12.

The Ecological Fallacy

2011-10-17T07:00:00.000-04:00

I found a scholarly name for the tendency to rate goalies on winning teams as better than goalies on losing teams. It's the ecological inference fallacy. You can read all about it on Wikipedia, but in short it is the assumption that all members of a certain group share the same characteristics of the entire group. To quote Wikipedia:

If a particular sports team is described as performing poorly, it would be fallacious to conclude that each player on that team performs poorly. Because the performance of the team depends on each player, one excellent player and two terrible players may average out to three poor players. This does not diminish the excellence of the one player.

Nor does it boost the performance of an average player who happened to have great teammates. Avoid the ecological inference fallacy and give credit where it is due, based on an individual's contribution to the team effort regardless of the final result.

To see this type of thinking in action, go read one of the post-game report cards that fans put up after their team plays. In many cases, when a team wins there are As and Bs across the board. Yet when the team loses, everyone gets Cs and Ds.

Check out, for example, Vancouver blog Nucks Misconduct's report cards from last year's Cup Finals. In Vancouver wins, the average score for Vancouver fourth-liners was 9.1. When the Canucks lost, the average score for fourth-liners was 7.0. Can the Canucks' losses be blamed on a line that barely played and had little impact overall on the series? Of course not. It just so happens that when Roberto Luongo was making saves and the other forward lines were scoring then Victor Oreskovich, Tanner Glass, Jeff Tambellini et al looked better by association. In contrast when Luongo got shelled and the Sedins were shut down, the same guys playing their usual 6 or 7 crash-and-bang minutes without a goal for or against ended up getting hung with the same mediocre grade as the stars who were actually driving the bus. That's the ecological fallacy in action.

I'd say this logical error explains quite a few of the most common mistakes made in rating goalies. Add in the base rate fallacy that causes people to exaggerate their praise or criticism for a goalie's performance by not properly factoring in the play of a typical replacement ("Without Lundqvist, the Rangers would have lost at least 10-1!"), plus the fundamental attribution error which makes people lean towards personality-based explanations for team successes or failures ("Carey Price's teams will never win in the playoffs because he lacks mental toughness"), and finally availability bias ("I don't remember any of Mike Liut's career except for that Canada Cup Final where he let in 8 goals, but that game proves he was an awful clutch performer"), and you've probably covered 95% of the rest of them as well.

Desire and Success

2011-10-13T07:00:00.000-04:00

(I wrote the rough draft for this short post at the end of last season but never ran it, and was recently reminded of it while watching the Winnipeg Jets get beaten 5-1 in their home opener by the Montreal Canadiens. That was not entirely the same situation as the one described here, given that Montreal was certainly looking to add two points just like every other team this early in the season, but one still would have thought that the Jets players would have that extra motivation to kick off a new era of NHL hockey in Winnipeg with some success. Nevertheless, they still came up four goals short.)

There are abundant cliches in sports that attempt to relate winning to effort level. How many times have you heard an announcer say something like "they just wanted it more" in an attempt to explain why one team emerged victorious while the other team did not?

I've posted before about effort-based explanations being largely ridiculous at the professional level given the stakes involved, but there are some situations where there is in fact a clear imbalance in incentives between two teams, such as late in the season where one team is already out and the other is facing a must-win game. What happens in that case, does the team that wants it more always win?

During the last weekend of the 2010-11 regular season, three teams (Carolina, Chicago and Dallas) all controlled their own destinies and all only needed to win their final game to clinch a playoff berth (the Hawks actually only needed to get to OT). None of their opponents had anything to play for, as all three of them were either eliminated or could not change their playoff seeding. Carolina and Chicago were playing in front of their home fans, while Dallas got a non-playoff opponent in the Minnesota Wild. In addition, Detroit was the only one of the three opponents that went with their starting goalie. In every case, the situation looked very favourable for the team that needed to win to get in, especially if "wanting it more" is a good predictor of success in the NHL.

Those three teams combined to go 0-3. Every playoff home date is worth millions to their franchises and earning the opportunity to compete for a Stanley Cup has huge intangible benefits to NHLers yet all three teams squandered their chance. The Chicago Blackhawks did manage to qualify for the postseason, but only because they got lucky when Dallas also failed to seal the deal.

The statistical case for the heavy role of luck in hockey has been well-made, but there remains a resistance for many traditionally-minded hockey fans to accept numbers-based conclusions. That's why sometimes it is good to use other types of arguments (I particularly like the game-charting ones, like this one, for example, because they can't be simply dismissed out of hand by the people who have an ingrained anti-stats outlook). I'd submit that the fact that a team can have a skill advantage and home ice advantage and a starting goalie facing an opposing backup and a huge advantage in incentives and yet can still lose the game is a simple yet powerful observation that supports the heavy role of luck in the sport of hockey.

Goalie Effects on the Jack Adams Award

2011-10-10T07:00:00.001-04:00

Last week Hockey Prospectus asked me to predict the 2011-12 award winners as part of its ongoing season preview. I usually just throw out names for that kind of thing because it's a pure guess anyway, and to be honest I'm not at all sure that I know much more than the next guy about who is going to be this year's best rookie or best defenceman or best coach.

Anyway, for Jack Adams I filled in Guy Boucher's name after not much more than a few seconds of thought about it. I figured he did a pretty good job last year and attracted lots of attention during Tampa's run to the Conference Finals, and if the Lightning finish with another 100+ point season maybe people would write his name down on their ballots.

Not too long afterwards, there was an insightful comment on Coppernblue by dkball7: "DeBoer should be everyone's pre-season pick for Jack Adams. As long as the team's PDO regresses to 100%, he will look like a genius."

In hindsight, it makes sense that I should not have picked a coach on a team that performed well the year before, like Boucher's Lightning, but should instead have picked one on a team that underachieved, like DeBoer's Devils. The Coach of the Year often goes to a candidate on a team that massively improved relative to the year before, which often is caused in large part by a significant swing in percentages from one year to the next.

I looked at the teams for each of the Jack Adams award winners since 1990, and compared each team's performance during the year where their coach picked up his hardware to the team's performance during the year prior and the year following. Here are the percentages, with everything adjusting to an average level of 10.0% shooting/.900 save percentage:

Prior to Jack Adams Year: 10.2% shooting, .897 goaltending, 99.9 PDO

During Jack Adams Year: 10.7% shooting, .909 goaltending, 101.6 PDO

Following Jack Adams Year: 10.4% shooting, .905 goaltending, 100.9 PDO

Only one out of 21 of the teams that produced a Jack Adams award winner posted a below-average save percentage during that season. In contrast, during the prior year, 13 out of those 21 teams had a below-average save rate. During the year after, the goaltending still remained strong for the most part, with just three teams dropping back to below-average save numbers.

The following year numbers imply that either the teams had slightly above average shooting and goaltending talent as a whole, or the award-winning coaches themselves combined for a positive effect on the team's numbers.

I think the goaltending numbers in the year after are more likely to reflect goalie talent than the coach's system of play. There were a number of top goalies represented (e.g. Hasek, Brodeur, Luongo, Thomas). Overall, the goalies had an average career save percentage of .906 over a period where the league average save percentage was .902. Considering that some of their careers stretched back further than 1989-90, when the league average was even lower, it seems reasonable that the combined goalies were about .005 better than league average, although it should be at least noted that some of the coaches in the sample have been known to affect shot quality, particularly guys like Burns and Lemaire, which may account for a small part of the above-average result.

It is interesting that many of the teams had the same goalie during the Jack Adams year as they did the season before. Eleven of 21 teams had the same starting goalie, with all of them playing a relatively similar number of games as well. Here are the save percentage numbers for the season prior, during and after, split out by whether the team had the same netminder as the year before (numbers adjusted again to league average with a baseline of .900):

Same goalie: .901, .909, .907

New goalie: .893, .909, .904

The largest improvements came for teams that brought in new goalies, obviously, but a good goalie coming off of an average season can also have a big impact in improving a team's fortunes and getting his head coach some extra attention.

The numbers do suggest that a lot of things simply went right for coaches during their winning years, but I certainly don't want to imply they had no effect at all. There is, for example, the shots for and against evidence, which shows that the teams also had a substantial improvement in their underlying possession metrics during the Jack Adams winning years. Teams playing for a Jack Adams winning coach were also more disciplined than average, as well as more disciplined compared to the year before.

Prior to Jack Adams Year: 1.005 SF/SA ratio, 362 PPOA

During Jack Adams Year: 1.064 SF/SA ratio, 340 PPOA

Following Jack Adams Year: 1.044 SF/SA ratio, 350 PPOA

Goaltending and shooting luck do not determine everything, but a lot of what the best coaches do is difficult to judge and rate, especially from a distance. For that reason, exernal factors can often come into play. As the old hockey saying goes, "Show me a good coach and I'll show you a great goaltender."

In summary, if you want to maximize your chance of being named the NHL's best coach, you should try to get a job on a team that either had awful goaltending the season before and made a move to address that weakness, or where a good goaltender had a down year. Either one of those scenarios would give a coach the best chance to see his team's percentages swing around in a hurry, leading to a significant improvement in the standings. That will in turn cause many people to think there must have been some coaching magic at work, and if you're lucky the awards recognition will soon follow.

To make a better Jack Adams prediction, we should apply this logic to this year's teams, and find a team with good goaltending that had weak goaltending last year and is likely to improve in the standings. The Flyers and Caps brought in new top-flight goaltenders, but both actually had pretty good save percentages last season. Several other teams have also improved in net but are still expected by most to finish near the bottom of the league and as a result are unlikely to produce a Jack Adams winner (Islanders with Nabokov, Senators with Anderson, Avalanche with Varlamov).

There are five teams that had subpar goaltending last season as well as overall PDOs below 100 that could be primed to do better in 2011-12:

New Jersey: 7.3 SH%, .906 Sv%

Toronto: 9.0 SH%, .907 Sv%

Tampa: 9.3 SH%, .903 Sv%

St. Louis: 9.5%, .902 Sv%

Columbus: 8.4%, .900 Sv%

Guy Boucher's Lightning show up on this list, suggesting that my random intuition may not have made that bad of a pick after all. There has to be some concern, however, for the fact that starter Dwayne Roloson is turning 42 next week. That said, he should still be better than the combo of Mike Smith and Dan Ellis (.894 last season), and Mathieu Garon will also provide improved backup goaltending. The Lightning may see their shooting regress slightly, but if they can duplicate last year's outshooting results and if Roloson can hang together to give them better goaltending then they will be definite challengers in the East. That could put Boucher in the conversation for Coach of the Year, but I'm not sure if it would be enough, especially if there is someone else out there who oversaw a much larger improvement in terms of wins and losses.

Age is also a concern for Martin Brodeur, but nobody is expecting a .903 again, and the New Jersey shooters are virtually guaranteed to improve (7.3% is a major outlier for a team shooting percentage). Jaroslav Halak also would be a good candidate for a bounceback year in St. Louis. If James Reimer is the real deal with .920 talent in the NHL he could certainly win Ron Wilson a trophy this year, but that still doesn't look to me like a good bet. As long as Columbus is going to continue to bet all their chips on Steve Mason I'm not sure I'll be expecting above-average goaltending in Columbus, although there likely could be some improvement there, perhaps even enough to get into the playoffs depending on luck and how well the rest of the team plays.

After considering this evidence, I think Peter DeBoer is the best pick for the 2012 Jack Adams, with all signs pointing to the Devils coming back strongly this season. There is always the chance, of course, that a team loses a star player and keeps on trucking, like Pittsburgh did in Dan Bylsma's award-winning campaign, or that one of the league's best teams has a spectacular year and cleans up at awards time, or that a team with a lot of new additions like Buffalo really comes together and climbs the standings. At the end of the day, the most likely winner is probably the coach who saw the largest improvement from the year before, and for this season the team with the best chance to improve is almost certainly the New Jersey Devils.

Why Doesn't Carolina Get Better Backup Goalies?

2011-10-03T07:30:00.000-04:00

As I pointed out in my last post, the depth of talent among the league's goaltenders has improved substantially in the NHL over the last 15 seasons. Quality talent has never been more readily and cheaply available than now. At the same time, the salary cap has increased parity across teams, resulting in close playoff races nearly every season in both conferences. The simple conclusion to make based on this fact is that no team should accept awful backup goaltending. It doesn't cost much more to get average goaltending than it does to get replacement level goaltending, and bubble teams that are content to let a washed-up veteran or an over-his-head youngster play backup minutes are jeopardizing their playoff chances in doing so.

There has been one NHL franchise in particular that has seemed to not understand this principle, having been repeatedly burned by weak backup goaltending. That team is the Carolina Hurricanes.

Last year, Carolina finished two points behind the Rangers for 8th in the East, despite a terrific season by Cam Ward (37-26-10, 2.56, .923). Ward actually had a better win/loss record than Rangers starter Henrik Lundqvist (36-27-5), but the decisive difference that sent the Blueshirts to the playoffs at the expense of the 'Canes was what happened when neither #1 netminder was in the net. Solid veteran Martin Biron had a .923 save percentage and an 8-6-0 record in New York, while youngster Justin Peters was lit up in his infrequent playing time in Carolina (3-5-1, 3.98, .875). While Carolina saved money with Peters' $525K cap hit, it would have only cost them an extra $350,000 to pay a guy like Biron.

According to Capgeek, the Hurricanes had $9.5 million in salary cap room last season. Would the team's ownership have been willing to spend an extra $400K if they knew there was a good chance it would have helped the team earn the extra three standing points needed to earn millions in revenue from at least two extra playoff home dates? They would surely have agreed to that deal in a heartbeat. The Canes' management can't be entirely faulted, as Peters was a four-year minor league pro coming off a pretty good season in the AHL and he was probably at least somewhat unlucky to post numbers that terrible. On the other hand, one of the main reasons to get a good #2 option is to minimize the risk of a relying on a unknown quantity.

It was a similar story in Carolina in 2007-08. Ward wasn't quite as good back then, but much of the roster was just two years removed from winning the Cup. Despite a .904 save percentage, Ward's record was 37-25-5, easily good enough to put the 'Canes in playoff position. The problem was that backups John Grahame and Michael Leighton combined for a brutal 6-8-1, 3.58, .878, and the team was again left one win short of making the playoffs.

Backup goaltending left the 'Canes out of the playoff picture for a third time in '99-00, as the team finished an agonizing one point out after their backup goalies combined to go 3-7-1, 3.22, .883. Apparently the organizational indifference to goaltending depth was carried over from Hartford, as the Whalers had more or less the same thing happen in 1996-97 (two points out of the playoffs despite a great year from Sean Burke because the backups combined for .887 and a 10-17-5 record).

Over the last 17 seasons, the numbers are pretty staggering for the Whalers/Hurricanes franchise:

#1 goalies: .532 win %, 2.60, .911

Backups: .413 win %, 3.15, .890

Those splits aren't entirely fair because there may have been a few times when the preseason #1 goalie was supplanted by a backup (as was the case in 1997-98 with Trevor Kidd outplaying incumbent starter Sean Burke, for example). However, it is still perfectly correct to say that Carolina/Hartford has had mostly awful backup goaltending for the better part of two decades, and that has likely had a significant impact in causing the team to fall short of the playoffs on multiple occasions.

Scouting, evaluating and predicting goaltender performance is always difficult. Not every bet is going to pay off, and many organizations get decisions wrong. Take Buffalo, for example, a team that has developed and employed a number of top-quality netminders in recent years, yet still paid Patrick Lalime $2.65 million for three years of service where the Sabres went 9-26-5 in games where he got the decision. Lalime probably cost his team a playoff spot in '08-09, posting a 5-13-3 record as the Sabres fell just two points short.

There have been a number of other teams that were left outside the playoff pictures because of the performance of their backup goalies. Sometimes teams missed out because a goalie they counted on to be a starter or take on a significant workload in a platoon role simply had an awful season (e.g. '06-07 Avs, '08-09 Predators). Others simply had a few options behind their starting goalie ('09-10 Rangers, '06-07 Maple Leafs).

Most of these examples of weak backup goalies are dealing with small sample sizes, so it may not be entirely fair to blame the goalies. All the standard problems of relying on win/loss records for goalies apply, although in nearly all cases they had awful save stats as well. There may also have been other factors at work. Perhaps they weren't playing a favourable schedule, or maybe some of them just had puck luck go against them for 200-300 shots. There is the very large advantage of hindsight available to us now in pointing out some of these teams' decisions. Yet when there is a long-term trend of undeperformance, as is the case in Carolina, a reasonable criticism can certainly be advanced about the way the team handled their goalie situations.

The overall point is that while it is not smart to pay huge money for goalies, the depth of available goaltending talent means that you should never, ever have to settle for bad goaltending. If you have a hole on the roster, it really doesn't cost much more to pick up a veteran or an up-and-coming talent from Europe than it would to roll the dice on an unproven minor-leaguer in your system. For a penny-pinching playoff bubble team, it's probably well worth it to invest some decent money in goalie scouting and development or free agency to reduce the risk of having a not-ready-for-primetime backup come in and sink the season.

Over the summer Carolina signed Brian Boucher to a two-year deal worth $950,000 per year, which may be a sign that the organization is more willing to loosen up the purse strings for their backup position. Then again, the 'Canes haven't always gone with a backup like Justin Peters; over the last 17 years there have been a number of veterans who were brought in but didn't pan out. I think there is a good chance that pattern may repeat again with Boucher, a guy turning 35 in January with a post-lockout save percentage of .902. Boucher is expected to take more of the load off of Cam Ward this season, but he'll need to deliver good enough results, especially if the Hurricanes again find themselves in a dogfight in the middle of the Eastern Conference. If he does not, then the hopes of Carolina fans may yet again be dashed by their backup goaltender.

Goaltending Parity

2011-09-29T08:00:00.002-04:00

I was flipping around Hockey Reference the other day, looking at the results from the 1995-96 NHL season. That was a strange year in many ways. The still-terrible expansion franchises in Ottawa and San Jose were both doing their part to skew the standings. In the West, Detroit cleaned up, winning 62 games to set a new league record, while the Wings' bitter rivals and eventual Cup champions Colorado Avalanache were the league's second-best regular season team, leading to a rare situation where 10 out of 13 Western Conference teams finished below .500. In the East it was the exact opposite situation, with nine teams finishing at 86 points or better, including the defending Stanley Cup champions from New Jersey who missed the playoffs despite a record that would have ranked them fourth in the West.

It was a unique year for goaltending as well, particularly as many of the big stars had off-seasons or down years. Patrick Roy got traded by Montreal, Ed Belfour had an off-year and was in the process of losing his starting job in Chicago, while Dominik Hasek and Martin Brodeur both played well but missed the playoffs. All that combined to allow a 22-year old sophomore named Jim Carey to walk off with the Vezina Trophy, all of the voters completely unaware that he would have only three seasons remaining in his professional career.

The league was still full of the old guard of standup goaltenders, many of whom were past their prime or struggling to keep up with the changing game. The result was a huge spread in the save percentage numbers among starting goalies, all the way from Hasek at the top with .920 down to Don Beaupre at .872.

The large gap in results was likely influenced by a higher level of shot quality differences across teams than we see today, particularly for goaltenders representing the Sens or the Sharks. However, even within teams there was a broad range of performance numbers, suggesting that goaltending was a real difference-maker back then. Going through team by team, it is impossible to avoid noticing that the starters almost always had much better win/loss records than the backups.

Compiling the numbers league-wide demonstrates this point (I just took the goalie with the most games played that season for each team to represent their "starter"):

Starters: 611-512-156, .539

Backups: 318-417-118, .442

The totals can be skewed a bit by some team's starters playing more games than others, but even if you take the average of each team's starter and backups you get .536 and .436, a full .100 increase in winning percentage with a team's most-used netminder in the game.

Only five out of 26 teams had a better win/loss record with their backup goalie(s) in the game. Only three more teams had their backups post a win percentage that was even within .050 of their starter.

Let's compare that to 2010-11:

Starters: 838-605-186, .572

Backups: 392-328-111, .539

That gap is much closer, even more so when the averages are taken for each team (starters .564, backups .547). Thirteen out of 30 teams had a better winning percentage when their top goalie didn't get the decision, and eight more had a difference of less than .050 between their starter and backups.

These results strongly confirm what analysts all over the place have been pointing out regarding today's goalies, that there is far more depth at the position today than in prior decades. The two big factors in the increased level of talent was the technical revolution sweeping the game and the increasing influx of European goaltenders.

In 1995-96, only 7 out of 78 goalies in the league were European (I don't count Olaf Kolzig as a European product, he grew up in Canada and played all his minor hockey there). They combined to play a total of 247 games.

By last season, there were 29 Europeans among the league's 87 goaltenders, meaning the percentage of Europeans rose from 9% to 33% in just 15 years. The European goaltenders also combined to play over four times as many games (1077) as they did in 1995-96.

Based on this evidence, it is perhaps unsurprising that there appears to have been a stronger correlation between goalie talent and championships won in the mid-to-late 1990s than in the post-lockout era, where the best goalies have mostly struggled to achieve much team success. Today, it's simply much harder to stand out from the pack.

The Significance of Two Vezinas

2011-09-27T15:00:00.001-04:00

As everyone knows, strange things can happen to a single goalie over the course of a single season. Jose Theodore can win the Hart, Jim Carey can win the Vezina, Andrew Raycroft can win the Calder. There are a lot of goalies who had one great season mixed in with a nondescript or average career. Seen in retrospect, that year seems to be most likely founded on a lot of luck and perhaps aided by teammates, or else perhaps came at a point in time where the rest of the league was not yet aware of and able to exploit that netminder's particular weaknesses and tendencies. In a few cases, it is likely that the surprising goalies were legitimately performing at a high level for a brief peak, before later falling off to a lower standard of play as as result of injuries, age, or some other factor.

But two great seasons, that's a different story.

Those who are interested in the Hall of Fame debate often look at comparables, trying to determine if a player with a specific profile has company already in the Hall of Fame. For example, if all players who finished top-10 in scoring X number of times are already inducted, then it seems reasonable to view that as support for any player who achieved that same number of top finishes.

For goalies, there is a very simple Hall of Fame cutoff that so far works with 100% success: Every goalie with 2 or more First Team All-Star selections is a Hall of Famer.

That is not to say that every goalie in the Hall of Fame was voted at least twice as the game's best goalie. Several of them only achieved that honour once, and Gerry Cheevers never did it at all. But everyone with two is in, and that brings us to Tim Thomas.

Tim Thomas had one of the most impressive goalie seasons ever last year, especially when the playoffs are taken into account. Including the postseason, Thomas played in 82 games and stopped 93.9% of the shots against him. His even strength save percentage over that stretch was simply off the charts at .948. That's a level that nobody has come close to since Dominik Hasek was in his prime. Assuming no shot quality or scorer bias effects, Thomas was about 45 goals better than a league average (.913) goalie during the regular season, and another 23 goals better in the playoffs. Thomas faced 33 shots per game in the playoffs and still ranked #1 in GAA. In short, he not only had video game numbers, but he was absolutely dominant at the most important time of the year. In my opinion, Thomas should have won the Hart Trophy.

Does that mean Tim Thomas is a Hall of Famer? With a Cup and a Conn Smythe to go with his two Vezinas, his trophy case is already worthy of the Hall, but longevity really hurts him in any such discussion. Thomas was already 31 years old when he first won an NHL starting job, and at the age of 37 he only has 319 career regular season games played. It remains to be seen how many campaigns are left for a goalie who thrives on his athleticism, but if Thomas can keep his game at a high level for another three or four seasons, he would at least be approaching the numbers that would make it seem like much less of a long shot (500 career games, 50 career shutouts, a career save percentage in the .920 range). At least it wouldn't if the Hall is open to rewarding dominance, rather than just counting longevity and career compiling. With his current 90th place ranking on the career wins list, Thomas isn't likely to end up among the all-time leaders in any of the counting categories.

It will be interesting to watch the conclusion of Thomas' career, to see whether he is the modern-day Johnny Bower or if he merely has a short but meteoric prime. Either way, he will be an interesting test case as a Hall of Fame candidate a decade or so down the road.

Pre-Lockout Chris Osgood Was Not Clutch

2011-09-21T16:00:00.001-04:00

"I always loved the fact that when we were tied or the games were close in the last 10 minutes, I'd shut the door and we'd win the game," he said.

"I knew how I did my job on a great team." (Chris Osgood)

I figure that after a long silence in this space, it would only be fitting to get back into it with one of my favourite topics: the overratedness of Chris Osgood.

Actually, to be honest, I wish I didn't have to make posts like these. The recently-retired Osgood should be remembered as a guy who overcame all kinds of obstacles and worked hard to outlast a ton of other goalies who may have had more natural talent. I thought this was a terrific read that showed Osgood's dedication in rebuilding his game to incorporate modern techniques. I get why Detroit fans loved their scrappy netminder, it's great that fan bases identify with blue collar guys who give it everything they have out on the ice.

But, unfortunately, most people still can't separate individual play from team success. In their eyes, 400 wins and 3 Cups make you a Hall of Famer, no further analysis required. They portray Osgood as something that he simply never was, and that's not fair. Ergo, as long as there are specious and silly arguments being thrown out in his favour by people with influence within the hockey community, then I'm going to keep making posts to set the record straight. Sorry, Ozzy, it's nothing personal, I just believe that credit should go where credit is due.

One of the points I have repeatedly tried to make regarding Chris Osgood is that even if you think he was a supreme clutch performer in the 2008 and 2009 playoff runs, that should still not have any impact at all on how you rate his playoff performances from earlier in his career. Many fans seem to have a tendency to revise their evaluations of a player based on their late-career performance, and that makes no sense.

I think Osgood got a lot of help in 2008 and a lot of favourable bounces in 2009, but I will still readily concede that it is much, much more supportable to assert that Ozzy was clutch in those two seasons than it is to claim that Osgood was clutch in the playoffs from 1994-2004.

It would in fact be far, far easier to make the case that Osgood was a spectacular choker in his early career than it would be to argue that he made the big saves when his team needed them most.

Here's the data to support that statement. I looked at Chris Osgood's playoff numbers in the third period based on the game score from 1994 to 2004 (source: Hockey Summary Project). Without play-by-play records to separate out the shots by score, I chose to measure Osgood's GAA in each situation:

Trailing by 2+: 1.02
Trailing by 1: 2.10
Score tied: 2.98
Leading by 1: 2.53
Leading by 2+: 1.88
Overtime: 3.18

The most high-leverage situations with the highest loss in win probability from allowing a goal against are when a team is tied or leading by one goal late in the game. It's hard to miss the observation that these precise situations are the ones where the other team was most likely to score on Osgood. Coincidentally, his goals against numbers dropped in situations where the penalty of a goal against was the lowest. That is not the expected profile of a goalie who was giving up goals when it didn't matter and slamming the door when the game was on the line.

Grouping the numbers into just two groups, the most high-leverage situations (tie game in third & OT and preserving a late one-goal lead) and then everything else, you get these numbers:

OT/tied/up by 1: 2.81

All other situations: 1.71

Of course his teammates playing to the score would have had an impact on those numbers, but did the Red Wings allow over 60% more shots against in the most pressure-packed situations? There's simply no way that was the case, which means that Osgood's individual numbers definitely dropped as the penalty for a goal against rose.

Assuming the shots were distributed evenly regardless of score, Osgood would have had an .881 save percentage with the score tied or his team leading by one, compared to a .924 save percentage the rest of the time. The one situation where it is possible to fully separate out Osgood's save percentage is overtime, where he let in 6 goals on 46 shots for a wholly unimpressive .870 save percentage.

In an attempt to better account for score effects I estimated the shot frequency for each score by taking the average shots in only third periods with more than 15 minutes played with that particular score, and then used those averages to adjust Osgood's expected shots based on his minutes played. The result was that Osgood's numbers got even worse in the most clutch situations, falling to .880, while his save percentage rose to .929 with his team either trailing or leading by 2 or more goals. Even if you want to go so far as to ignore that attempt and simply assume that the Wings allowed shots against at a 20% higher rate in the high leverage situations, the save percentage split would still be .901/.915.

All this is despite the fact that save percentages are higher on average for goalies in the lead than they are for goalies who are trailing, because trailing teams tend to put as many pucks on the net as possible. For example, in this post I show some playoff split numbers for five real elite goalies, who combined to put up a .930 save percentage in third periods that they entered leading by one, compared to a .918 save percentage in third periods they began with a one goal deficit. If you need further convincing, a recent Hockey Analysis post gives even strength numbers broken down by score that show how save percentages rise for the team in the lead.

I also recently developed an additional measure of a goalie's clutch play using the Hockey Summary Project box scores. It is an estimated game-tied save percentage, calculated by noting how much of each period was spent with the score tied, pro-rating the shots for each team during that period by that amount of time, and then noting how many tiebreaking goals were scored by each team. After compiling those figures for each playoff game, a save percentage can be calculated to estimate a goalie's save rate with the score deadlocked. Because of score effects it is not likely to be exact, but it should provide a reasonable estimate. Another benefit is that this measurement covers the entire game, rather than just the third period and OT.

From 1994 to 2004, Chris Osgood's estimated save percentage with the score tied was .890, which is right in line with the estimates from his GAA. That is a substantial drop from his overall pre-lockout playoff save percentage of .910, implying a .922 save percentage in situations where one team (usually his own) held a lead. In addition, it was estimated that only 28% of Osgood's shots against came with the score tied. The main reason that Osgood's teams usually won was that they heavily outshot the opposition in close games (estimated ratio of 1.25 to 1 with the score tied).

Small sample sizes are always a concern when looking at playoff stats, and even more so when the sample is broken down into smaller chunks based on game score. The entire third period and OT sample covers just 681 shots, and the estimated game-tied shots are even lower at 608, which does leave room for the possibility that Osgood was simply unlucky. The process of putting these numbers together is also based on tedious compiling, which raises at least the possibility of an error although I checked the numbers where I could.

At the very least, however, we should be able to claim that there is no evidence to suggest that Osgood improved his play when the pressure rose. On the contrary, the statistical record is very clear that the more desperately the other team needed to score, the more likely they were to slip one past Chris Osgood.

In 2008 and 2009, Osgood's numbers vastly improved in the same situations:

OT/tied/up by 1: 1.53

All other situations: 1.21

Yet again, however, Osgood's GAA was higher when the game was on the line and lower when the outcome was less in doubt, although the split is not as extreme as the one above. I'm not saying that to be critical of Osgood's performance, merely to argue against the claim he selectively raised his game in certain spots. His estimated game-tied save percentage was .933, which is slightly higher than his .928 overall, which could indicate that he was slightly better when the score was close. However, there remains little reason to suggest that Osgood made a significantly greater contribution to winning than his overall numbers indicate.

It remains possible to make a clutch argument for 2008 and 2009 based on the way Osgood's numbers improved from the regular season to the playoffs. I don't buy that it was a conscious thing that Osgood decided to just make himself play well once the puck dropped in the postseason, but the subjective and objective evidence does certainly support the claim that he played better from April to June than from October to March. Maybe Osgood learned how to be clutch, maybe he went on a hot streak, maybe he was just playing behind a dominant defensive team. Either way I don't think that is enough to make up for all the "big goals" Osgood allowed over the rest of his career.

I've stated before that I'm always skeptical of how subjective observers rate the clutch play of an athlete because they let other factors enter the picture, often unknowingly. This appears to be another example of that exact error. Detroit Red Wings fans, Osgood's teammates and even apparently Osgood himself all want to believe in the idea that their team's long-time netminder was clutch, that he made the key saves for the team, that his average numbers are misleading because he always came up big with the game on the line. The problem is that the evidence suggests it was probably just a misperception caused by selective memory and attributing things to Osgood that were more than likely primarily caused by other players on the team. If anything, Osgood appears to have been the opposite of clutch through the vast majority of his playoff career.

What's Going on Out West?

2011-04-22T13:38:00.003-04:00

So far in the Stanley Cup playoffs, there has been a pretty stark contrast in goalie numbers between the two Conferences.

Eastern Conference: 2.04 GAA, .931 save %
Western Conference: 3.26 GAA, .893 save %

If you rank the starters in order of save percentage, here's the breakdown based on their conference:

1. East
2. East
3. East
4. East
5. East
6. East
7. West
8. East
9. West
10. East
11. West
12. West
13. West
14. West
15. West
16. West

Even more surprisingly, the top 3 goalies out West in save percentage thus far are Corey Crawford, Ray Emery and Jimmy Howard. The big name puckstoppers (Luongo, Bryzgalov, Rinne, Quick, Niemi) have been absolutely lit up to the tune of a combined 3.77/.880.

I'm not sure if this can be attributed to poor goalie play or a more wide-open style of play or just standard variance over a 1,000 shot sample. There have been some softies, but there have been also been a lot of shooters making their shots as well.

The argument can be made that the Eastern goalies as a group are slightly better, but I don't really see the gap as being all the large. During the regular season, the Eastern playoff starters combined for a .9209 save percentage while the Western starters were at .9205.

It seems inevitable that the tide will eventually turn for the Western netminders (and defensive units), but it has certainly made for an unusually high-scoring first round of the playoffs.

Goalie Point Shares

2011-03-16T11:00:00.001-04:00

Hockey Reference introduced a new point shares metric recently. Is it a valuable stat that sheds more light on historical goalie performance?

Let's look at the all-time top 20 list:

1. Patrick Roy
2. Martin Brodeur
3. Terry Sawchuk
4. Tony Esposito
5. Glenn Hall
6. Jacques Plante
7. Curtis Joseph
8. Ed Belfour
9. Dominik Hasek
10. John Vanbiesbrouck
11. Roberto Luongo
12. Rogie Vachon
13. Sean Burke
14. Harry Lumley
15. Gump Worsley
16. Tomas Vokoun
17. Grant Fuhr
18. Tom Barrasso
19. Bernie Parent
20. Billy Smith

I conclude pretty confidently that the above list doesn't come close to passing the common sense test, as it deviates significantly from virtually every other ranking method out there. There's lots that I could nitpick, but I'll just point out that I don't think I've ever seen any other career list, statistical or subjective, that had Joseph, Belfour and Hasek ranked in that order.

It looks like the percentage of credit given to the goalies for team results is too high, and longevity has an excessive impact on the rankings. I probably rate Sean Burke higher than most, especially for his work in the second half of his career, but he still shouldn't be anywhere close to 13th all-time. In fact, given that Burke ranks 12th in career games played, he's a pretty good test case to see whether you are evaluating a goalie's actual performance or just giving them points for showing up for work. I can't help but conclude that Goalie Point Shares does far too much of the latter.

If you're looking for a one stat representation of a goalie's career, I'd still recommend sticking to era-adjusted save percentage or GVT.

Longevity

2011-03-07T08:00:00.000-05:00

Here are some career games played numbers, counting all games played in the regular season and playoffs in the NHL, all games played in a major European professional league and all games played in senior international competitions:

1. Dominik Hasek: 1,358
2. Martin Brodeur: 1,325
3. Patrick Roy: 1,282
4. Ed Belfour: 1,153
5. Curtis Joseph: 1,092

Brodeur and Roy have been rightly praised for their excellent longevity, but it's the guy at the top of the list that might surprise some NHL fans.

Hasek was the youngest professional hockey player ever as a 16 year old in the Czech League, and he led the KHL in shutouts this season three decades later at the age of 46. To put that into perspective, Gordie Howe's professional career spanned 34 years, just 4 more than Hasek's to date.

Hasek ranks 5th all-time among NHL players in career GVT, even though just 63% of his professional games were played in the NHL. Give him credit for those European games (the vast majority of which were played while Hasek was good enough to play in the NHL but prevented from doing so by communism), and there's probably a good argument to rank him no worse than 3rd behind only Howe and Wayne Gretzky for the highest total value career ever.

Get 'Em While They're Hot

2011-03-04T08:00:00.002-05:00

Through December 31, Antti Niemi had a career save percentage of .907 on his first 2,197 shots faced in the NHL, including his playoff run with Chicago. That's not enough to even cover league average, which has been north of .910 for the last couple of seasons. Given that Niemi is an undrafted free agent who has never stood out from the pack in any professional league has played in, that doesn't seem to indicate much of a future as an NHL starting goalie.

In the 2011 calendar year, though, things have turned around for the Finnish netminder. Niemi has stopped 670 of 716 shots for a .936 save percentage since January 1. The result is that the Sharks recently signed him to a 4 year, $15.2 million deal.

Chicago wasn't willing to pay Niemi $2.75 million for just one season, yet San Jose apparently thinks he's worth a million bucks more than that for each of the next four years. This is also after the Sharks signed Niemi for $2 million during the offseason, and after Niemi struggled early on. Two bad months + two good months = roughly two times the paycheque? Both the term and the money make that a pretty baffling move from San Jose's perspective. Perhaps they're so desperate to finally win something in the playoffs that they're willing to overpay anybody with a Stanley Cup ring on his finger.

To quote Gabe Desjardins in a comment written as a follow-up to his terrific post on a goalie's first 15 NHL games:

"The main point here is that you need 2000+ shots to make a decision about a goalie…And that to get a 2000-shot tryout, you’re best off hitting a performance high in your first few hundred shots…"

Niemi did it backwards. He got his 2000 shot tryout, and he couldn't even manage to be league average despite playing on strong teams the entire time. Then he hit a performance high in his next 700 shots and cashed in. The result is that he'll have a higher cap hit next season than either Pekka Rinne or Kari Lehtonen.

Rinne, Lehtonen and Niemi are all Finnish starting goalies, but I'd still maintain that one of them is not like the others. Whether it was a result of falling in love with his recent form or overrating his playoff team success, San Jose appears to have made a pretty bad bet with the Niemi contract.

The Between the Lockouts Cohort

2011-02-10T15:00:00.000-05:00

A look at goalie Hall of Famers listed by birthday reveals a repeated clustering effect, as I pointed out in my last post. I want to take a more detailed look at one group that seems to have been particularly disadvantaged by environmental factors in terms of their Hall of Fame chances, the group of goalies that entered the NHL during the Dead Puck Era (which has been given differing endpoints by different people, but for now I'll use the period between the lockouts as a convenient definition).

On the surface, breaking into the NHL at a time when scoring was low seems to be a great opportunity for a goalie to put up some great numbers. However, this "between the lockouts cohort" was a group of goalies that faced increased competition from a larger talent pool, consisting of both better North American athletes choosing to play goal as well as a new influx of talent from Europe, making it much more difficult to stand out from the pack. They also had to deal with a quartet of first-ballot Hall of Famers that not only dominated the league's awards, but also hogged the starting jobs on the league best teams for much of the pre-lockout period.

Once those greats faded off into the sunset, and the new crop began looking for their own shot at backstopping a contending team to glory, the salary cap changed the way great teams were built. Instead of bringing in a hired gun veteran All-Star netminder to complete a championship team, as every Cup winning team did between the lockouts other than the Devils and the '98 Red Wings, many of the league's best teams have decided to invest their precious payroll dollars in maintaining depth in their group of skaters rather than spending big money on the goaltending position, or have decided to develop goalies internally rather than take the risk of shelling out big money on the free agent market.

As a result, a fairly mediocre collection of goalies have won the Cup since the lockout, while many of the league's most tenured netminders currently ply their trades for non-contending teams. Once again, the universe seems to have stacked the deck against the between the lockouts group.

The overall result was that this group did not win much individual award recognition or experience much team success, increasing the chances that few of them will be remembered long after their careers come to an end.

To be considered part of the group that I'm talking about, a goalie's first season as a starter has to have come between 1994-95 and 2003-04 inclusive. Since 2005 there have been a number of goalies with promising starts to their career who could attract Hall of Fame attention, either because of their play/awards recognition (e.g. Lundqvist, Thomas, Miller) or playoff success (e.g. Ward, Fleury).

Between the Lockouts Goalies, Sorted by Career Games Played:

Goalie	GP	W	SO	Sv%	PO W	PO SO	PO SV%
Nikolai Khabibulin	730	314	43	.908	39	6	.917
Roberto Luongo	653	296	54	.919	17	1	.919
Tomas Vokoun	615	258	43	.917	3	1	.922
Jose Theodore	567	254	30	.909	19	1	.911
Evgeni Nabokov	563	293	50	.912	40	7	.913
Dwayne Roloson	545	204	28	.910	18	1	.915
Marty Turco	536	273	41	.910	21	4	.914
Tommy Salo	526	210	37	.905	5	0	.909
J.S. Giguere	518	231	34	.913	33	6	.925
Miikka Kiprusoff	505	263	37	.913	25	6	.921

These ten goalies have combined for just 2 Stanley Cup rings and 2 Vezinas, with none of them managing to win both. Not only does the group have only two Vezinas, but it came awfully close to not having any at all. Jose Theodore tied Patrick Roy with 105 points in the 2002 voting, winning only via the first place votes tiebreaker. If just one of the GMs with Theodore first and Roy second had switched their vote, Roy would have taken home that award. As if to reinforce the narrowness of Theodore's victory, the Habs netminder lost out on the First Team All-Star honour to Roy.

As for Kiprusoff's Vezina in 2006, here are his stats up until the Olympic break compared to Dominik Hasek's:

Kiprusoff: 29-14-7, 2.23, .915, 6 SO
Hasek: 28-10-4, 2.09, .925, 5 SO

At that point in the season Hasek may have had the edge, despite playing for a stronger team, but then he went and pulled his groin at the Olympics and left the door open for Kiprusoff to run away with it. Kipper did have a fantastic second half that year, and may have won regardless, but I think it's safe to say that without the injury Hasek would have been a strong contender for the 2006 Vezina.

On the other hand, I think this group lost out on several awards that it rightfully should have won, including Turco in 2003 and Luongo in both 2004 and 2007. But with respect to what did happen, it's not too hard to envision a scenario where they would have been completely shut out.

Khabibulin and Giguere are the only goalies in the group with Cup rings. Those two as well as Kiprusoff and Roloson are likely considered by many to be good playoff goalies based on all of them having a signature deep postseason run to their credit. However, if you look at their playoff careers other than that one year none of them have a distinguished record of success, except for Giguere, who won the Cup and Conn Smythe in separate postseasons.

Yet even Giguere has had his share of bad games and more than a typical share of being relegated to the backup role by a teammate. Without '03, Giguere is 18-11 but with a pedestrian .907 save percentage in the playoffs. Without their runs in '04 Khabibulin is 23-24, .911 and Kiprusoff is 10-17, .915, and without '06 Roloson is 6-7, .892.

Evgeni Nabokov has had some postseason opportunities on strong teams, but although he leads this group in playoff wins he is considered by many to be a playoff disappointment. I'm not sure it's really fair to suggest Nabokov didn't play up to his usual standards in the playoffs. I doubt he performed all that differently, the main difference was likely that the higher level of postseason opposition removed much of the team advantages that helped boost his traditional stats in the regular season.

Nabokov is the only one of these goalies that has repeatedly started in the playoffs on legitimate Stanley Cup contenders. Giguere and Khabibulin had great teams when they won but not too much help outside of that. Turco played for a couple of very strong teams in Dallas and Nashville was a really good team in 2007 with Vokoun, although it was never easy to make it through the tough Western Conference. Other than that, there haven't been many teams with any of these goalies in net that would have been found among the Stanley Cup odds leaders on the eve of the playoffs. Luongo, Roloson and Vokoun have all missed the playoffs far more often than they have made it, despite strong regular season play. All 10 have a playoff save percentage as high or higher than their regular season mark. The cause of the general lack of playoff team success seems to be primarily the result of a lack of support, rather than poor clutch performance by these goalies as a group.

With Nabokov's attempted move to Detroit blocked by Garth Snow and Turco relegated to the bench in Chicago, the only goalies from this group that appear to be in a good position to make some playoff noise this spring are Luongo and Roloson. Because of his age and the strong group of teammates around him, Luongo has a great chance to add to his playoff portfolio over the next 5 seasons. It seems unlikely that any of the others will be in a similar position, although of course deadline deals or free agency could significantly alter their prospects.

Right now, I don't think any of the between the lockout group are sure Hall of Famers. I think Luongo is very much on track to get there some day, and would be close to a sure thing already if he was fairly evaluated for his performance in Florida or if there wasn't such a focus on team success for goalies. Other than that I'm not sure anyone else will come close.

The top contenders either have the individual hardware but lack the career totals (Giguere, Kiprusoff, Theodore), or have the career numbers but lack the awards (Luongo, Vokoun, Nabokov, Khabibulin). In another time and place, most of these goalies might well have racked up lots of hardware and wins and team success and fame and "money goalie" accolades. Yet with the hand they were dealt, most of them appear fated to be remembered as little more than good goalies that played in the shadows of Hall of Famers.

Hall of Famers Come In Fours

2011-02-07T09:00:00.001-05:00

Looking through the list of goalies in the Hall of Fame sorted by birthday, there seems to be a repeating pattern. Several goalies will be inducted that were all born over a short time period. That will be followed by an extended dry spell, before another cluster of similarly-aged candidates gets enshrined. This is followed by another gap, and the cycle repeats.

This doesn't particularly apply to the oldest goalies in the Hall of Fame (Hugh Lehman, Georges Vezina, Hap Holmes, Clint Benedict and George Hainsworth), all of whom were born between 1885 and 1895. Then again, things were quite different back then in hockey's early days, with several different professional leagues, teams folding and moving all the time, and some goalies having very atypical career curves, often playing many years of amateur hockey before breaking into the professional at an advanced age.

The first group of Hall of Fame goalies who spent the large majority of their careers in the National Hockey League were born around the turn of the 20th century: Roy Worters (1900), Alec Connell (1902), Tiny Thompson (1903), and Charlie Gardiner (1904). After those four, it took a decade to produce the next Hall of Famer (Turk Broda in 1914).

Broda was quickly followed by Brimsek the following year and Bill Durnan the year after that to create the trio of goaltending legends that dominated the NHL in the 1940s. In the decade after Durnan, Chuck Rayner (1920), Johnny Bower (1924) and Harry Lumley (1926) were born. Lumley and especially Bower made most of their Hall of Fame cases after the previous "Big Three" had retired.

Perhaps the best goalie cohort of all was the 1929-1931 group, which includes Terry Sawchuk, Jacques Plante, Gump Worsley and Glenn Hall. In the wake of that dominating quartet there was a gap of eight years until the next Hall of Famer, and even then the next two inductees born (Ed Giacomin in 1939 and Gerry Cheevers in 1940) are both among the weakest goalies enshrined, with Hall of Fame cases largely built on taking advantage of an unbalanced league.

It took 12 years after Hall until the next no-doubt first-ballot Hall of Fame netminder came into the world in the person of Tony Esposito in 1943. Once again, he was quickly followed by a couple of others: Bernie Parent in 1945 and Ken Dryden in 1947, with Billy Smith arriving not far behind in 1950.

The next decade (1951 to 1961) didn't see any goaltenders born who would eventually be considered Hall of Famers, and that is probably not likely to change either with the games played leaders from that period including Mike Liut, Greg Millen, Andy Moog, Kelly Hrudey and Don Beaupre.

With 1962 came Grant Fuhr to break the drought, but 1965 was the real money year for goaltending ability, producing three first-ballot Hall of Famers in Dominik Hasek, Patrick Roy and Ed Belfour. All goalies born in 1965 combined to play a 4,687 games in the NHL, well ahead of any other year on record, and Tom Barrasso may still have an outside chance at making it four Hall of Famers from one birth year.

Yet again the feast and famine pattern looks like it will continue, with Curtis Joseph the only goalie born from 1966 to 1971 that is likely to be even seriously discussed by the Hall of Fame committee, and although some goalies have significant portions of their careers remaining the only guaranteed Hall of Famer born since 1971 remains Martin Brodeur.

What is causing all this? Is it merely that the random allotment of goaltending ability just happened to result in some groupings close together? That's likely part of it, but it's not particularly probable that a similar pattern would have repeated itself essentially four times in a row.

Factors that may have had some impact are the level of league scoring, the size and level of parity in the league, and changing league rules or revolutions in goalie training or techniques. Certain periods seemed to be set up better than others to create Hall of Famers, either because lower scoring levels led to lower GAAs and higher shutout totals or because an unbalanced league made it easier to rack up wins on the top teams.

Beyond that, it seems apparent that opportunity would have played a significant role, especially in smaller leagues with only 6 or 12 starting jobs available. In reality it was likely even more restrictive than that, given the required level of team success typically needed to produce a Hall of Fame career. With two or three teams dominating the standings year after year throughout much of the NHL's history, goalies usually either had to be fortunate enough to be signed by those elite clubs, or else they had to play well enough for long enough on one of the league's bottom-feeders that they were eventually given the chance to don the sweater of a Cup contender.

I'd say that the most likely explanation is that a few elite goalies have a tendency to monopolize awards and gravitate towards the best starting jobs in the league, making it that much harder for the guys coming after them to put together the trophy case and team success that the Hall of Fame has historically required for entry.

I don't rate goalies based on traditional accomplishments like Vezina Trophies, postseason All-Star selections and Stanley Cups, but many people do, including apparently most of the Hall of Fame voting committee. In that type of evaluation method, I think it is important to consider the strength of a goalie's teammates and the quality of goaltending peers he was competing against, and to consider not just how many times a goalie won an award but also how many times he got close to winning. After all, the best goalie in a particular season and the best goalie in the league are not always the same thing. There are additional useful ways to verify how well a goalie was rated by his contemporaries, if you consider that to be an important piece of information, such as looking at observer accounts and other primary sources, salary/trade history, international selections, coach and player polls, etc.

That said, I still maintain that a careful analysis of historical statistical performance remains the best method to properly evaluate the accomplishments of a netminder, with care taken to adjust for team factors during the parts of the league history that were more unbalanced than others.

The Streakiness of Stamkos

2011-01-31T14:00:00.000-05:00

I thought this was kind of interesting:

Steven Stamkos, 2010-11:

First 22 games: 21 goals, 4.0 shots per game
Next 6 games: 0 goals, 2.8 shots per game
Next 10 games: 10 goals, 3.7 shots per game
Next 6 games: 0 goals, 3.7 shots per game
Next 7 games: 7 goals, 2.6 shots per game

That makes two goal-less streaks the length of a typical playoff series for Stamkos this season, even in the midst of a truly dominant stretch of goalscoring.

I can imagine the kind of silly things the media would be tempted to write if Stamkos just happened to hit another 0 for 6 streak some time in late April. To the right kind of reactionary, frequentist, narrative-loving mind, that would reflect his flawed inner character, prove he was a perimeter player unsuited to the playoffs, show that he hasn't yet learned what it takes to win, and probably confirm a dozen other meaningless cliches that you've heard many times before. All because the release point on that famous one-timer may have been off by a couple of centimetres for a few games in a row.

This type of thing is why it is so important to compare performances to a baseline. Do you think your hometown scorer is playing poorly because he hasn't scored in two weeks? Maybe he is, but that is not necessarily the case, he might just be on a streak of bad luck. In any event it's far from abnormal, it happens to the elite as well. Just look at Stamkos.

How The Game of Hockey Taught Me That Goalie Wins Don't Matter

2011-01-18T07:00:00.000-05:00

There was a personal story posted over at Lighthouse Hockey by "Mikb" (who is also an occasional commenter here) that I wanted to use as a starting point in a discussion on the impact of hockey experience on goalie evaluation. Here's an excerpt of what he wrote, reproduced with his permission:

I was on a very successful team for a number of years – I was the MVP of a tournament we won, won a few leagues with the guys, good times – and then a lot of the guys I’d started with began to leave… jobs, age, moving away, etc. etc. The guys who were left were pretty good too, but we wound up losing four seasons in a row (we play three seasons per year, usually)…. tough OT losses, one loss in a nine-round shootout. These are single-eliminations, too, at least until the best-of-three final. ANYTHING can happen in a single game like that.

Well – those new guys kicked me off their team. Another team gladly snapped me up, and for the first year (three more seasons) it was the same thing… in fact, I think we got shut out each of the games.

If I had to guess, I’d say I had about a 1.50 GAA with nothing to show for it except a big fat scapegoating. Then just this Tuesday night, my new team and I finally won. It was easily my WORST game out of the whole lot – two horrible goals against in the first five minutes, and my guys pulled [me] out of it with a big final period.

So – it annoys me when I hear stuff like “not clutch,” “learning how to win,” and “playoff choker.” I didn’t forget how to win for three years, and just remember this week. I wasn’t choking. I wasn’t “big when they needed it.” Hell, if I HAD been even barely competent early on, I wouldn’t have needed to make ANY big saves, we would have been winning 3-0, there would have been no OT heroics and no shootout saves.

I think a lot of that is probably very familiar to long-time goalies, the vast majority of whom would have their own anecdotes about either taking heat for losing on a bad team or having to do little more than show up to win behind a powerhouse.

When I was much younger, I remember disagreeing with an older goalie who stated that a goalie is mostly just as good as the team in front of him, but as much as anything else it was my experience that changed my outlook. I don't think it was ever more clear to me that I was just one small part of an overall team effort than in one particular game where in my estimation I played about as well as I could possibly play and my team still lost 4-0. On a different day maybe I would have been a bit luckier, maybe they wouldn't have made a few of the shots that they made and we could have at least still squeaked a tie out of it, that's the variability of goaltending and that's always the hope that goalies cling to for the next outing. But on that day I was in peak form and it didn't matter one bit, we still got crushed.

The other thing that I concluded from both personal experience and subjective observation is that it is ridiculous to describe people in absolutes, and that you are doomed to failure if you expect to be able to perfectly predict performances based on past results. Like Mikb points out, labels are easily applied but mostly meaningless; I see them as the product of bias and lazy thinking. Some individuals may have tendencies, even more so at lower levels of play, but people are complicated and randomness happens. Every athlete knows that they are not consistent every time out, regardless of their best intentions.

There was one particular big game I played in where I was just completely out of form. I had been playing well leading up to it, and I wasn't that nervous and didn't feel any different than usual before the game, right up until the point where I realized that I could barely catch a puck in warmups. That's when I started to get a bit concerned (perhaps another example in support of Kent Wilson's argument that confidence is an effect, not a cause?) I spilled rebounds on most of the shots against that day, but luckily my defence was outstanding and we ended up with a shutout win.

Other times in that exact same scenario I've been calm and confident. I don't think I'm a choker or a clutch player, but it's entirely possible that next time out I might choke and the game after that my play will be supremely clutch. I'm not a robot with only one setting, and I don't believe anyone else is either. I've been described before as trying to "erase the human element" by discounting clutch play, but I hardly see how it is any more of an acknowledgement of the human element to have a perspective of players as video game characters who perform exactly the same way in every clutch situation based on the value of their "poise" rating. Good days, bad days and luck are all big parts of that human element, and are likely all big reasons why it is difficult to find evidence of clutch skill in the data.

I want to make it clear that I am not saying that we can extrapolate every beer league observation and apply it to the pros. Their level of talent and preparation is on a completely different level and they are playing for much, much higher stakes. At the end of the day, though, they're still people, and they are still playing the same sport with the same basic rules as the peewees down at the local rink.

That's why I struggle to understand how anyone could play a large number of games as a hockey goaltender on a variety of different teams without coming to the conclusion that rating goalies based on wins and team success is a foolish endeavour. I think it must simply be the case that conventional hockey wisdom is at fault, and that the cliches and coaching points that people hear at the rink, on TV and around the game have taken root to such a degree that people let them overshadow their own observations.

Sometimes the problem areas of sports logic stick out most clearly when they are compared to an analogous setting in a different area (which, as someone who is a bit of a stickler for logical consistency, I like to do every now and then). It's a rare individual indeed who wouldn't scream and yell and cry martyr when he gets blamed individually for the failings of others at work or school, but for some reason that same guy goes home and sits down in front of his TV and heaps scorn on the quarterback or the goalie when his team loses. It doesn't make a lot of sense, especially if that guy had sports experiences of his own the prior weekend that should have further reinforced the point. It really does seem that hockey groupthink has a powerful impact on many observers.

So, if you are one of those types who think that stats are meaningless and Cup rings are the litmus test for a goalie and that Chris Osgood is a fully deserving Hall of Famer but Grant Fuhr was the best you ever saw, I can only recommend that you strap on the pads and get into a game and focus on your own observations. If you are honest with yourself and if you take the time to compare your experiences against some of the premises that you have long accepted as uncontested fact, I think you just might come around to a different way of thinking on the matter.

Road Performance - Active Goalies

2011-01-11T07:30:00.001-05:00

There are a number of active or recently retired goalies who did not meet the minimum games cutoff for my last post. I wanted to run the road numbers on them as well to see if there were any interesting results. I decided to limit it to goalies with at least 250 games played, to avoid guys with really small road samples. Unlike the last post, these numbers include 2010-11 numbers.

Active or recently retired goalies:

1. Tim Thomas: +.013 save %, +58 goals

2. Ryan Miller: +.009 save %, +45 goals

3. Henrik Lundqvist: +.009 save %, +42 goals

4. Niklas Backstrom: +.009 save %, +29 goals

5. Manny Fernandez: +.006 save %, +29 goals

6. Kari Lehtonen: +.007 save %, +27 goals

7. Manny Legace: +.005 save %, +22 goals

8. Cam Ward: +.004 save %, +15 goals

8. Ilya Bryzgalov: +.004 save %, +15 goals

10. Cristobal Huet: +.001 save %, +3 goals

11. Chris Mason: +.000 save %, +0 goals

12. Kevin Weekes: -.001 save %, -3 goals

13. Rick DiPietro: -.003 save %, -13 goals

14. Vesa Toskala: -.005 save %, -19 goals

15. Marc-Andre Fleury: -.005 save %, -22 goals

16. Johan Hedberg: -.005 save %, -23 goals

17. Mathieu Garon: -.006 save %, -24 goals

18. Andrew Raycroft: -.007 save %, -26 goals

19. Brian Boucher: -.007 save %, -31 goals

20. Patrick Lalime: -.007 save %, -39 goals

21. Marc Denis: -.014 save %, -71 goals

- There is a clear top three here, which isn't too surprising, although I didn't expect Miller to rank ahead of Lundqvist. Given that the Swede is two years younger than the American it is still probable that King Henrik ends up ahead over the long run.

- As I discussed in the comments to my last post, Buffalo actually was much more disciplined at home than on the road during this period, yet Miller's save percentage was .912 at home and .916 on the road. I think there may have been a difference in style of play for the Sabres at home through much of Miller's career, with a lot more scoring taking place in Buffalo home games. Perhaps that affected Miller's numbers, as going by road stats only he looks like an elite goalie. I think it is possible he was a bit underrated based on his numbers when the Sabres had their terrific offensive team going immediately after the lockout.

- This is also a reminder that Roberto Luongo stands head and shoulders above his goaltending peer group in terms of career success. Despite being just one year older than Miller and three years older than Lundqvist, Luongo has double the road goals against average of either of his rivals.

- Adjusting for special teams factors would put Kari Lehtonen solidly in fourth on this list, considering that the Thrashers faced more power plays than average while Backstrom and Fernandez both had the benefit of playing on very disciplined Minnesota squads.

- Cam Ward is coming on strong in this ranking. His numbers were hurt by being rushed to the NHL before he was ready in 2005-06 and 2006-07, but he is +20 over the past two and a half seasons.

- Cristobal Huet was very good at home (.919) and very average on the road (.908). I think that, knowing what we know now, Huet was probably never as good as his numbers suggested he was during his peak from 2006 to 2008. In addition to the road numbers, which suggest a potential helping hand from either teammates or the official scorer, Huet also has the other warning sign for goalies: Strong numbers on special teams compared to average numbers at even strength. Huet's career EV SV% of .918 is right at league average over the course of his career, while his career PK SV% of .887 and his career PP SV% of .961 are both off the charts relative to the league average from 2002-03 to 2009-10 (.866 and .913 respectively).

- Yes, Pittsburgh fans, you read that right: Marc-Andre Fleury rates below Vesa Toskala. Toskala had a couple of nice years in San Jose that pull his numbers up, but Fleury has never really been all that good on the road in his career.

- I remain baffled as to why some of the goalies near the bottom of this list were able to carve out such long careers. It makes no sense that a guy like Patrick Lalime is still drawing an NHL paycheque. He has never that good of a goalie, and he has only gotten worse in recent seasons. Lalime's post-lockout save percentage is .894 and the Sabres are 9-25-5 with Lalime in net over the last three seasons. Any random starting goalie from the AHL or the Swedish Elite League would probably beat those numbers. There are too many good goalies out there today for any team to keep giving washed-up veterans opportunities at the highest level.

- Marc Denis: Yikes. Denis was 29.7 goals below average on the road in 2002-03, second only to Jeff Hackett's brutal record behind the completely outclassed San Jose Sharks in 1992-93. To be fair, Denis was on a young expansion team as well, and the third-year Blue Jackets ranked fourth in the league in power play opportunities against. That said, Denis only had one season in his career with positive goals above average on the road. It looks to me like his career may have been aided by some fortunate timing, as the Quebec goalie factory was at the peak of its reputation when Denis broke into the league in the mid-'90s. If his name was Mark Dennis, would he have lasted as long as he did in the NHL? His numbers certainly make one wonder.

Goalie Performance on the Road

2011-01-06T08:00:00.001-05:00

It has been shown pretty convincingly that the definition of a shot on goal can vary from rink to rink around the NHL. The problem is that there is still a fair bit of guesswork involved in trying to tease out exactly which rinks may be padding the stats and which ones may be shorting them, and even once we can prove that there has been a track record of bias in one city or another it could still change instantly with a single hiring decision.

In response to this uncertainty, I thought to take an ultra-conservative route in this post and assume that every official scorer in the NHL is so biased that they can't be trusted for anything at all related to the home team. Under that assumption we would have to throw out all home save percentage data and rely on road numbers only, hoping that any potential undercounting or overcounting will roughly balance out for goalies who play in a variety of rinks on the road.

In addition to the issue of scorer bias, it seems more likely that a team could control their style of play while in their home rink. To quote Vic Ferrari, "When a team wants to play a low tempo game, the opponent is more likely to oblige in your barn than in front of their own fans." The home team has last change and can decide whether it wants to shut down the opposition's best players with a defensive line or whether to slug it out power vs. power. It seems that the level of parity in today's NHL is such that there is little difference in shot quality from team to team, but if there are any persistent team effects on a goalie's numbers from style of play it seems more likely that they would appear in the home sample than in the road sample.

I'd like to break these down by game situation, ideally, but that special teams goaltending data only goes back about a decade or so whereas detailed home/road splits for all goaltending stats are available going back to 1988 on Hockey Reference. For each season, all home games were thrown out and the road numbers were adjusted based on the league average that year. Current season results were not included.

Nothing changes much in terms of rankings at the top of the list, but there are a few goalies with unusual results that either indicate that there may have been something going on with the shot counting or with the team's style of play at home. On the other hand, perhaps they really enjoyed that home cooking, or maybe it is no more than a statistical quirk arising from cutting the sample size in half. Nothing can be proven with any certainty by this type of surface analysis, but there are some team situations that definitely seem to warrant a closer look.

The goalies are sorted by road goals saved over average, calculated by subtracting the league average save percentage from the goalie's road save percentage for each season and then multiplying by the number of shots faced on the road. Note that since goalies typically have better numbers at home than on the road, comparing to league average means that this definition of average is a slightly higher standard than usual. Current goalies with fewer than 450 career games played were not included for now, but will be discussed in a future post. Keep in mind also that these numbers represent partial career results for goalies who played in the NHL prior to 1987-88.

Tier 1: The Elite

1. Patrick Roy: +.015 save %, +180 goals

2. Dominik Hasek: +.017 save %, +163 goals

3. Martin Brodeur: +.010 save %, +145 goals

4. Ed Belfour: +.009 save %, +110 goals

5. Roberto Luongo: +.010 save %, +92 goals

Tier 2: The Good

6. Marty Turco: +.006 save %, +40 goals

7. Curtis Joseph: +.003 save %, +36 goals

8. J.S. Giguere: +.005 save %, +35 goals

9. Felix Potvin: +.003 save %, +27 goals

10. Dwayne Roloson: +.003 save %, +25 goals

11. John Vanbiesbrouck: +.003 save %, +25 goals

Tier 3: The Average

12. Evgeni Nabokov: +.002 save %, +14 goals

13. Chris Osgood: +.001 save %, +12 goals

14. Tomas Vokoun: +.001 save %, +11 goals

15. Sean Burke: +.001 save %, +10 goals

16. Nik Khabibulin: +.001 save %, +5 goals

17. Guy Hebert: +.001 save %, +4 goals

18. Jose Theodore: +.001 save %, +4 goals

19. Ron Hextall: .000 save %, +3 goals

20. Mike Richter: .000 save %, +2 goals

21. Martin Biron: .000 save %, -1 goal

22. Andy Moog: .000 save %, -2 goals

23. Tom Barrasso: .000 save %, -2 goals

24. Miikka Kiprusoff: -.001 save %, -8 goals

25. Jocelyn Thibault: -.001 save %, -10 goals

26. Jeff Hackett: -.002 save %, -12 goals

27. Arturs Irbe: -.002 save %, -16 goals

Tier 4: The Mediocre

28. Ron Tugnutt: -.003 save %, -19 goals

29. Kelly Hrudey: -.003 save %, -26 goals

30. Olaf Kolzig: -.003 save %, -32 goals

31. Tommy Salo: -.005 save %, -33 goals

Tier 5: The Dinosaurs

32. Ken Wregget: -.006 save %, -39 goals

33. Grant Fuhr: -.006 save %, -46 goals

34. Mike Vernon: -.006 save %, -57 goals

35. Kirk McLean: -.007 save %, -58 goals

36. Bill Ranford: -.007 save %, -65 goals

Some points of discussion:

- The top five really separate themselves from the field by this metric. All are 50+ goals better than the rest. Both Brodeur and Belfour had higher save percentages on the road than at home over the course of their careers, and both benefit quite a bit from going on away numbers only. In fact, assuming the road numbers accurately reflect the overall level of performance and taking into account shot prevention while also recognizing both Roy's team advantages in Montreal as well as the weaker pool of goaltending talent that Patrick was competing against in the late '80s, plus the fact that Roy retired younger than the other two and skipped his decline phase, there may not actually be that much separation between the three of them in terms of regular season results.

For example, if we add one shot prevented to Belfour's save percentage and assume that Brodeur's shot prevention is balanced out by his special teams advantages, then both are around 145 goals saved. All it would take to drop Roy to roughly the same career number is to assume that either he created one extra shot per game against on average or that his expected save percentage was understated by .003 because of weaker competition or Montreal's defensive play and team discipline. Having said that, this doesn't take into account playoff play and the 1988 cutoff means Roy isn't getting credit for two of his seasons. Brodeur is also on pace to give back around 15 goals compared to average this season if he can't fix his struggles in the second half.

- In his first 12 seasons in the NHL, Curtis Joseph saved his teams 68 goals compared to league average on the road. In his final 7 seasons, he gave 32 of them back. Joseph's early career peak would have put him near the elite group, but he did not have anything close to the staying power of the top 4.

- Sean Burke is the anti-Cujo, with -41 in his first dozen seasons and +50 in his final six. If you want further evidence of my argument that it was technique not equipment that was driving the changes in goaltending through the '90s, you'd be hard-pressed to find better examples than Burke and Joseph. Joseph's athleticism allowed him to excel early on, but when that faded as he aged the game rapidly passed him by. In contrast, Burke remodeled himself into a butterfly blocker and put up his best performances in the twilight of his career.

- If you define a goalie's peak as his best five consecutive seasons with a significant number of games played (and including numbers from light workload seasons that fell within the same stretch), Burke ranks an impressive 7th in peak road goals above average per game, trailing only Hasek, Roy, Joseph, Belfour, Luongo and Brodeur.

- Other surprise goalies in the top 15 for peak road results include Jeff Hackett (9th), Dwayne Roloson (10th), Felix Potvin (11th) and Arturs Irbe (15th).

- Arturs Irbe had an eight season stretch where he was 37 goals better than average on the road, playing three of them behind the fledgling San Jose Sharks. His overall numbers nosedived when he stuck around too long after his game fell off a cliff in Carolina, but that was a pretty impressive run without much team support at all.

- To show the kind of impact playing on the Sharks in the early '90s had, Jeff Hackett was -44 goals in San Jose in the first two seasons of that expansion franchise and +32 everywhere else.

- Trivia question: From 1992-93 to 1997-98, which goalie ranked third behind Hasek and Roy in most goals above average on the road? Not Brodeur, not Belfour, not Joseph, not Vanbiesbrouck. Would you believe Felix Potvin? Potvin was a lot like Cujo in that he didn't age well, but there was a lot to like early in his career, even though a lot of people underrate him because he played for mostly mediocre teams.

- Chris Osgood ranks 13th in career total, but just 25th in peak. Osgood has a close comparable in Evgeni Nabokov, who ranked 12th and 29th respectively. Nabokov had a few more peaks and valleys than the fairly steady Osgood, but the end result is that neither was able to put together a five season stretch on the road that was any better than slightly above average for a starting-calibre goalie.

- The biggest surprise on this list has to be Miikka Kiprusoff coming out as slightly below average. Throughout his career, Kiprusoff has a .920 save percentage at home compared to just .906 on the road. Even in his 2006 Vezina year Kiprusoff did not have great results on the road (a mere .904 in 35 games played). The confusing thing is that his shots against split is 27.0 per 60 at home compared to 29.6 per 60 on the road, which really doesn't seem to suggest a generous home scorer.

If there is a logical explanation for this, I'm not aware of it. Was Calgary more disciplined at home, did they change their style of play, did they benefit from lots of back-to-back games against teams that had just played the Oilers? I really have no idea.

- Olaf Kolzig is another guy who had underwhelming results relative to his reputation on the road both overall and in a Vezina winning season (.903 in 1999-00).

- Tomas Vokoun is another interesting case. His save numbers have been very good, especially post-lockout, but he has a Kiprusoffian home/road split of .923/.910. Vokoun's road numbers in Nashville were actually below average, which makes it seem even more clear that there is something going on in Nashville. Vokoun's numbers are better in Florida, although some remain skeptical about his performance there as well.

- I strongly suspect that Guy Hebert got his stats padded in Anaheim. He is a guy that I've noted before as often doing well in various save percentage rankings, but that's probably a bit misleading as Hebert was very average on the road and has another extreme home/road split (.916/.902).

- I still have no idea where to rank Tom Barrasso. Like the rest of his stats, his road numbers are all over the place throughout his career, although he'd presumably rate above average if his extra seasons from the mid-eighties were included.

It Doesn't Matter How Good His Teammates Were, He Still Had To Make the Saves

2010-12-31T08:00:00.002-05:00

"Hey, I just back from the new shopping mall. Gotta give it up for our mayor, that guy is the best ribbon-cutter in the town."

"He is? How could you possibly go about trying to determine that?"

"Well, I was there, and he was the guy in charge of opening the mall, and it got opened. Can't argue with results."

"OK, but that's kind of a simple thing, isn't it? I mean, any public figure can give a short speech, work a pair of scissors and pose for a few photos. The mayor is just the guy that gets assigned to show up and do it, that doesn't mean he is the best."

"Sure it does, you still have to cut the ribbon. Doesn't matter how easy you think the job is, it still needs to get done. You don't see anybody else cutting the ribbon, do you?"

"No, but that's because it is the mayor's job, not because other people couldn't do it."

"Who cares about other people? It's his job and he did it, that's all that matters, that's why he deserves the credit."

"It is? There were mayors before him that did it just as well and there will be mayors after him that will do exactly the same thing. Why does it matter who actually does it? You don't think that guy that narrowly lost the election two years ago could have done it?"

"I don't want to talk about what-ifs, just what actually happened. Yesterday the mall wasn't open, and today it is. I don't know why you hate the guy so much, why you won't give him any credit, you're probably just jealous. I was there when they opened the new library too, sure he may have flubbed a line or two and dropped the scissors twice but he showed his mental toughness by bouncing right back and when the big moment came he got the job done."

"I'm not arguing that he didn't get the job done. I'm saying that his job was fairly easy, and he did not make much of a difference in doing it. The mall and the library are both just as open right now as they would have been if another politician was wielding the ceremonial scissors. Giving credit for an easily replaceable effort makes little sense at all, you're just being overly impressed by the privileges of the guy's position."

"Obviously you don't understand anything about politics. Since that guy became mayor, he has cut the ribbons at 3 grand openings, while all the other losing candidates in that election have combined for zero. How can you argue with those stats?"

"Again, I'm not disputing that those accomplishments happened. I'm disputing their value. Of course our mayor did the job, but he did it no better than somebody with similar qualifications would have done it. The difference between him and those other guys with respect to grand openings was entirely a matter of opportunity, not a matter of skill. Why is that something to be celebrated? I'm completely baffled here."

"Say whatever you want, he can't hear you because of all of the freshly cut ribbons in his ears. You geeks never give that guy any credit, he's the most underrated mayor ever. Haters gonna hate, I guess. We're done here, I'll catch you later."

The Two Sentence Argument against Chris Osgood

2010-12-28T07:30:00.002-05:00

"It's not easy to win in this league, otherwise everybody would be doing it. I don't know how many goalies have played here in the last 15 years that I've been here, but I'm still here and I'm still wanted. That's what matters most and accounts for more than anything else. I'm a winner. That's all I do."
Chris Osgood

On the occasion of Chris Osgood's 400th win in the National Hockey League, I feel compelled to throw up this brief post. Every goalie needs to be evaluated in the context of their team environment. That's especially crucial for those who want to rely on statistics like wins and Cups in their analysis. My best attempt to concisely summarize Osgood's team environment is the following:

Chris Osgood's career record in playoff series where his team had a 20+ point regular season advantage over their opponents:

7 wins, 1 loss

Chris Osgood's career record in playoff series where his team had an advantage of less than 20 points over their opponents:

8 wins, 8 losses

(You might want to pull out a third sentence as well, either to establish context or in case that other guy whips out an anecdote about Montreal beating Washington or some other rare event: Over the course of Osgood's career, teams with a 20+ point advantage are 33-7 in playoff series).

When the Detroit Red Wings were way better than their playoff opponents, they nearly always heavily outplayed and outshot them. It's not too surprising that the stronger team with a big edge in scoring chances usually won.

On the other hand, when his teammates weren't far better than the opposition then it was pretty much a coin flip for Osgood's teams in the playoffs. When two even teams meet, you'd expect them both to win about half of the time. If one of them has a great, game-changing clutch performer then you'd expect his team to win more often, yet that wasn't the case. Throughout Osgood's playoff career in Detroit the Red Wings were mostly the higher-ranked team even in the closer matchups, yet with home ice advantage and a "winner" in net they still lost as often as they won.

The context is further displayed by the results of the other goalies who played in Detroit. Not only was Osgood often relegated to a backup role come playoff time, but overall the Red Wings really didn't suffer with other goalies in net. Here's a third line that really should be added to the two above to paint a complete picture:

Chris Osgood's teams' career record in playoff series where Osgood was sitting on the bench as the backup goalie:

9 wins, 4 losses

Expressing records like this can help drive home the point that certain goalies who won lots of jewellery did not, in fact, outperform others in the playoffs who won none. They merely played for much stronger teams, and when they did not have that advantage on their side then they were not big enough difference-makers to lift their team results above average.

Chris Osgood deserves credit for the determination and competitiveness that have allowed him to beat the odds and carve out a long and lucrative big-league career. Career milestones are a fitting time to show him that appreciation, but any attempt to portray him as one of the best of his peers is misinformed, career win totals notwithstanding.

Follow the Money

2010-12-14T22:30:00.000-05:00

A lot of people put stock in what NHL general managers have to say about different players and goalies around the league. It makes sense that these talent evaluators should have a better than average ability to rate hockey players, the problem is that few are going to go on record as being critical of anybody, and sometimes it's difficult to tell if a quote is a bland nicety or a real endorsement. Furthermore, nobody knows a player better than his own team's management group, but in almost all cases they are going to support the player in any kind of a public setting. Vezina voting gives us some indication, but there remains a difference between rating the best goalie of a particular season and the best goalie in general.

When you want to know what people really think, and not just what they say they think, it is usually better to focus on actions than words. That's why I think there is some value in looking at the size of the paycheques of goalies around the league. As with any numerical ranking, it's often good to bring in some outside knowledge to inform the rankings (insane longterm deals, home-town discounts, ELC/RFA/UFA years, salary inflation, to name but a few things that have an impact), but at the end of the day nobody pays anybody millions of dollars a year without expecting significant performance in return. And on the flip side, a general manager can go on for as long as he wants about how the goalie on his winning team is underrated and mentally tough and makes the big saves and is a great teammate, but when he refuses to open the purse strings come free agency time that is a stronger indication that his objective viewpoint is something altogether different.

Using Hockey Zone Plus and Cap Geek, I was able to put together career salary histories for most of the experienced starting goalies since 1990, and then applied a factor to adjust for the league average goalie salary in each season.

Here are the total adjusted earnings figures:

1. Patrick Roy, $76,550,000
2. Dominik Hasek, $55,510,000
3. Ed Belfour, $54,840,000
4. Martin Brodeur, $51,000,000
5. Mike Richter, $49,830,000
6. Curtis Joseph, $49,000,000
7. Tom Barrasso, $36,720,000
8. Nik Khabibulin, $35,340,000
9. Olaf Kolzig, $33,200,000
10. Sean Burke, $32,560,000
11. Jose Theodore, $27,410,000
12. Roberto Luongo, $27,280,000
13. J.S. Giguere, $25,430,000
14. Felix Potvin, $24,520,000
15. Kirk McLean, $24,400,000
16. Bill Ranford, $23,450,000
17. Chris Osgood, $22,940,000
18. Evgeni Nabokov, $21,320,000
19. Marty Turco, $20,920,000
20. Miikka Kiprusoff, $20,350,000

Contract timing and the adjustment factors make it unlikely that this list would come out with a perfect ranking, but it still comes out surprisingly well, especially when you look at tiers rather than specific rankings. The top four are correct, although admittedly very few people would put them in that order. Mike Richter shows one of the flaws of this method, that a goalie who was entrenched for a long time on a large market team with a spend-happy GM is likely to get paid disproportionately to everyone else. It's not too hard to make the argument that Joseph's repeated free agency paydays from several different franchises are more impressive than Richter cashing in on the '94 Stanley Cup run.

Barrasso, Khabibulin, Kolzig and Burke were a solid group of goalies that make up the next tier. Jose Theodore is the surprising leader of the the younger group of goalies, although this is the last year he will be ranked ahead of Roberto Luongo. Luongo projects to end up in Joseph/Richter territory by the end of his lifetime contract in Vancouver, and quite possibly higher depending on your assumptions of salary inflation.

The other interesting guy to point out is #17 on the list. If Chris Osgood was really the #2 goalie of the last decade, as some claim, then he needs to immediately sue his agent for gross malpractice. I think the reality is that, in the vote done with their owners' dollars, the league's general managers just weren't all that impressed by Osgood.

Here's a measure of peak effectiveness, each goalie's best 5 consecutive years in adjusted salary:

1. Dominik Hasek, $29,650,000
2. Patrick Roy, $29,271,000
3. Curtis Joseph, $25,297,000
4. Mike Richter, $23,424,000
5. Ed Belfour, $21,884,000
6. Nik Khabibulin, $21,726,000
7. Martin Brodeur, $21,103,000
8. Olaf Kolzig, $20,926,000
9. Roberto Luongo, $20,651,000
10. Tom Barrasso, $20,328,000
11. Jose Theodore, $18,719,000
12. Marty Turco, $16,580,000
13. Miikka Kiprusoff, $16,201,000
14. J.S. Giguere, $15,915,000
15. Kirk McLean, $15,888,000
16. Evgeni Nabokov, $15,793,000
17. Bill Ranford, $14,604,000
18. Henrik Lundqvist, $14,484,000
19. Tomas Vokoun, $13,705,000
20. Sean Burke, $13,536,000

This time Hasek beats out Roy for the top spot, with the two of them both well clear of the field. I think it's safe to say that Nikolai Khabibulin has had some pretty good representation over the years, while Brodeur likely left a good chunk of change on the table because he preferred to play in New Jersey. A few current goalies are slowly creeping up this list, in a couple of years Henrik Lundqvist will be just outside of the top 10.

Just one caveat, the adjustment is likely over-correcting for post-lockout goalies. With a maximum salary level, with more goaltending talent around the league and with restricted free agents getting paid big dollars earlier than ever before, there is no longer the huge salary disparity between the top veterans and the newcomers that was seen in the late '90s.

GMs and Goalie Stats

2010-12-08T08:00:00.001-05:00

The 1994-95 NHL regular season was very unusual. A lengthy lockout shortened the schedule to just 48 games per team, and to make the scheduling work every team only played against opponents within their own conference. The condensed schedule also gave teams fewer off-days, meaning they had less of an opportunity to catch up with the goings-on around the rest of the league.

The short season made it tough for all awards voters to identify the league's best, but it had to have been especially difficult for the league's general managers required to vote on the 1995 Vezina. Many of them would not have seen much at all of the other conference, and likely would only have seen the best goalies in their own division 3-4 times. Based on this I expect that 1994-95 was probably the season where GMs were most likely to rely on statistics when filling out their award ballots.

If that's true, then looking at the voting results should give some insight on how general managers rate goalies based on their performance numbers (the full Vezina ranking can be found here). How did they fare? In my opinion, not very well. Most of them voted for Dominik Hasek, but that shouldn't have been a very difficult choice at all given that Hasek was the defending Vezina winner and led the league in GAA, shutouts and of course save percentage, where he crushed the field by .013. The other rankings were less clear, and some of the choices left something to be desired.

In particular, there were three voters that seem to have completely failed the test, the trio of league decision-makers who rated Mike Vernon as the best goalie in the league.

Compare the stats:

Vernon: 19-6-4, 2.52, .893, 1 SO
Hasek: 19-14-7, 2.11, .930, 5 SO

I really hope those were Western Conference GMs who just saw Vernon really good against their own teams and didn't feel comfortable ranking Eastern goalies that they hadn't seen play. Even in that event they still made a very poor decision, but it would have been completely embarrassing for them if they actually looked at everyone's numbers and decided that Vernon had the best season based on wins and losses.

Detroit had a terrific team as usual that season, with a defensive unit led by Nicklas Lidstrom, Paul Coffey, Slava Fetisov and Vladimir Konstantinov, plus their usual strong group of forwards. Backup Chris Osgood actually had better numbers than Vernon (14-5-0, 2.26, .917). On the other hand, when Hasek wasn't in net Buffalo's goaltending numbers were 3-5-0, 3.86, .864.

Any given shot was 67% more likely to go in against Vernon than against Hasek. Vernon allowed 3.21 goals per 30 shots against compared to Hasek's 2.10. If you were to swap Vernon's goal support in Detroit with Buffalo's goalscoring during Hasek's first 30 games of the season (excluding one short relief appearance), it would have had a dramatic effect on the records of both goalies. Vernon would have had a losing record at 11-15-4, while Hasek would have improved to a spectacular 22-3-5. And that's based on raw goals against without even taking into account the fact that Vernon faced nearly 7 fewer shots against per game.

It wasn't even remotely close, that's the point I'm trying to make.

Looking at the Vezina votes overall, they ended up being split around a number of goalies, which was perhaps to be expected given the peculiar circumstances. In addition to Hasek and Vernon five other goalies received at least one first place vote, only two of whom ended up in the top 10 in save percentage, and 15 goalies ended up with at least one vote. No other season has ever seen more different goalies get named on Vezina ballots than 1994-95.

If you remove Hasek from the sample, since he was so obviously the best goalie that even a voter who never saw him play and was just going by traditional numbers like GAA or shutouts should still have been able to figure out that the Dominator was the most deserving, here are the correlations between the Vezina voting and other statistics among all other goalies with 20+ games played that season:

GAA: -.591
Win Percentage: .589
Wins: .536
Shots/60: -.534
Shutouts: .455
Save Percentage: .290

That makes it seem pretty apparent that most early '90s NHL general managers rated goalies based on wins and the strength of the defence in front of them. That's scary stuff, and is yet another reminder that we should be cautious when using historical Vezina voting results to rank goalies.

The Swedes Have It Right

2010-12-03T17:30:00.000-05:00

Do you want to know who is leading the Swedish elite league in goaltender wins this season? I don't know, and as far as I can tell there's no way to find out on their official website. They simply omit wins as a stat category.

If you want to sort Swedish goalies by statistics, you can only sort them by save percentage, GAA, total shots against and total saves against. That's it. They apparently don't seem to care that they aren't providing us with the crucial information that lets us know whether league-leader Victor Fasth is a "martyr goaltender" pointlessly racking up numbers on a bad team, or whether #2 ranked Alexander Salak really knows how to make the big saves in the clutch. How are us North Americans supposed to make snap judgments about these goalies' characters and their ability to perform under pressure when they are leaving out the crucial information of how good their teammates are?

It's quite possible there is some other way to find out which Swedish goalie has the most wins, but I just like the fact that they obviously don't consider that to be of any importance, given that they don't even bother to show the numbers.

Same thing with the International Ice Hockey Federation. Go to their website, and you won't find win/loss records either. Not only that, but like the other European sites their default sort is by save percentage (so much so that the link you have to click on to see goalie numbers is called "Goalkeepers (SVS%)", as shown here at the site for the 2010 Olympics). In contrast most North American sites will rank by GAA first, and even the NHL's own stats summary page for goalies ranks them by wins.

The only reason anybody gives any weight at all to goalie wins is because of the long tradition of tracking them and the related myths told by generations of hockey people and broadcasters. Europe probably doesn't have the same tradition, or else perhaps somewhere along the line somebody decided to speak up and point out how stupid it was to track team results at the individual level. Either way, good for them. Given that they don't care about wins and losses, how do you think Swedish and Finnish coaches are evaluating their young goalie prospects? No doubt they are using almost exclusively save percentage, and with the recent European goalie invasion it's pretty hard to argue with the results.

Occam's Razor

2010-11-30T12:30:00.000-05:00

Roberto Luongo is 16-2-2 with a .926 save percentage while representing Canada in senior men's international competitions. Before he turned pro, he also played great in two world junior tournaments and helped two different teams qualify for the Memorial Cup.

Luongo's career professional playoff numbers against every team other than the Chicago Blackhawks are 16-12, 2.15, .931.

Combine that with the international numbers, and Luongo is a sparkling 32-14-2, 2.07, .929 in postseason and international games as a pro that did not involve the Blackhawks.

Against Chicago in the playoffs, Luongo is 4-8, 3.52, .888.

Occam's Razor says the simplest solution is more likely to be correct. So, which solution seems simpler and better suited to the facts?

1. Luongo chokes in pressure situations, and just happened to either play behind powerful defences or get lucky every single time he played in big games, other than when he played against Chicago in the playoffs where his true nature was revealed.

2. Luongo is just fine in pressure situations, and he and his teammates matched up poorly against Chicago the past two playoff seasons.

The Wrong Numbers, Part 2

2010-11-19T22:00:00.001-05:00

(With about thee-quarters of this post already written, I noticed that my prior post on the wrong numbers in hockey had been linked to from the Leafs Central message boards, and in an interesting coincidence it was in a post where occasional commenter here Seventieslord was arguing exactly the same thing that I am about to claim in this post. I'll credit him where appropriate for a couple of things that I added on to strengthen my own argument).

Point totals in hockey seem to be magic numbers. The players who score the most are generally considered to be the best players, and players are routinely described to be playing well if they are racking up the points and not playing well if they aren't.

The problem is that isn't always true. There may be lots of reasons why a player is scoring or not scoring points other than his level of play, such as the type of situations his coach is putting him in, the shooting luck of his teammates, the play of the opponents he is matched up against, and just general puck luck. It is often the case that a player who outscored another in the playoffs was the better player, but this is far from always true, and that means it is a mistake to assume that a higher point total trumps all.

In my opinion, the 2009 Conn Smythe Trophy went to the wrong guy. I don't want to take anything away from Evgeni Malkin (well, other than the trophy they gave him, I guess), but I'd argue that Sidney Crosby was the Penguins' best player. There have been many Malkin vs. Crosby arguments debating which player stepped up in the Finals, which one the Red Wings focused their defensive attention on, which one carried the team in the key games in the earlier rounds, which one was the bigger leader, and so on. At the end of the day, I think there were really only two numbers that mattered: 31 and 36, the respective point totals of Crosby and Malkin. Like it or not, those numbers coloured the rest of the debate, and since 36 > 31, Malkin was the popular choice as Conn Smythe Trophy winner.

The way I see it, Crosby was the better player and the point totals are misleading. Crosby scored more goals and more even strength points than Malkin. With Malkin on the ice, the Penguins scored 41 goals and gave up 21. With Crosby on the ice, the team scored 40 and allowed just 14, in a similar amount of ice time, which indicates he and his linemates may have had a better two-way effort (which also came against tougher opposition). From those numbers and from watching the games, I don't think Malkin was outplaying Crosby, just outpointing him.

The reason that Malkin won the points race was power play scoring. Malkin scored 16 power play points to Crosby's 10. Not surprisingly, however, both stars were on the ice for the majority of the Penguins goals, given that they both played heavily on the team's first PP unit. There were 16 PPG that both were on the ice for, and Crosby and Malkin each had one additional goal where they were on the ice but the other was not.

During the regular season, both players got points on 75% of the team power play goals they were on the ice for. In the playoffs Malkin had points on 94% of his on-ice goals, while Crosby was at just 59%. It was certainly not the case that somebody else replaced Crosby's contribution (both Crosby and Malkin each scored more PPP than the rest of Pittsburgh's forwards combined). I think that the simple explanation is that puck luck worked to the benefit of Malkin and the expense of Crosby.

I watched all the power play goals Pittsburgh scored with either player on the ice on the NHL game highlights on Youtube, and noted how each goal was scored. Here is the breakdown of how they got their points:

Solo effort or good play to create the goal: Malkin 4, Crosby 3
Converting a routine rebound: Malkin 0, Crosby 2
Routine pass to a teammate who created the goal: Malkin 7, Crosby 4
Fortunate bounce: Malkin 5, Crosby 1
Third assists: Malkin 0, Crosby 3

The first Penguins' power play goal of the playoffs I counted as a fortunate bounce for both players, as Malkin's attempted pass across the crease was deflected by Martin Biron off of Crosby's skate and into the net. The other four goals counted as lucky for Malkin included: a point shot that bounced in off of Malkin's knee, a Malkin pass that was batted by an opposing defender right to Mark Eaton who promptly scored, an attempted pass to Crosby on a 2-on-1 that was deflected into the net by a defender for an overtime game-winner, and Brad Stuart knocking the rebound into his own net after Chris Osgood made the initial save on Malkin.

In all likelihood, Malkin and Crosby played at a similar level on the power play in the '09 playoffs, Malkin just ended up on the scoresheet more often. Even if Malkin did create a few extra scoring plays compared to Crosby 5-on-4, I don't think it makes up for Crosby's better overall performance.

Much was also made of the Stanley Cup Final scoring differential, but I'm still not sure that Crosby was any worse than Malkin in the Finals, even discounting the fact that the Red Wings obviously targeted Crosby as their #1 defensive priority. Crosby and his linemates were simply snakebitten that entire series. Bill Guerin and Chris Kunitz, Crosby's most frequent linemates, combined to score 0 goals on 32 shots. Guerin missed several point blank chances, and Crosby himself hit several posts and was robbed repeatedly by either Chris Osgood or Henrik Zetterberg. Guerin and Kunitz had almost the same shot rate against Detroit as they did in the other three rounds, yet nothing was going in. By my eyes, that certainly wasn't Crosby's fault. I think the hockey gods deserve at least as much credit for "shutting down" Crosby as Lidstrom and Zetterberg.

In contrast, Malkin's most frequent linemates Ruslan Fedotenko and Max Talbot combined to shoot 17% in the Finals. Malkin himself scored 8 points, but again it was a case of him being on the right side of some puck luck. Two of Malkin's routine power play assists came in that series on goals by Letang and Gonchar, and two more assists came on lucky breaks, one a horrible rebound by Osgood left for Fedotenko to bang in, and the other a bounce off of a forechecking Malkin's skate right to Talbot, who promptly scored. Malkin also got credit for the Brad Stuart own goal mentioned above.

There are two additional arguments for Crosby that I'm stealing from Seventieslord at Leafs Central. First, Crosby shouldered a heavy load with faceoffs, leading all players in the playoffs by taking a 37.7% share of his team's draws while winning a respectable 53% of them. Secondly, Malkin cost his team quite a bit of time spent on the penalty kill by taking 18 minor penalties, nearly double the number of any other player in the playoffs, while Crosby was only whistled for 7 minors.

While I think Crosby was superior, Malkin did play very well. Malkin also hit his share of posts and created chances where the puck luck wasn't on his side, which means it perhaps wasn't so unrighteous that he got some of the bounces along the way. It is also incorrect to completely discount routine plays, as the ability to consistently make routine plays under pressure is part of what differentiates a great player. Not every goal is an amazing end-to-end rush, after all. That said, the rate that those routine plays get turned into goals can certainly vary quite a bit in the short term.

In nearly every other playoff season, Malkin would have been a very deserving Conn Smythe winner. I just don't think he was in 2009, as the evidence supports Sidney Crosby. Unfortunately, many hockey observers have a tendency of looking at the wrong or the simple numbers and ignoring the importance of context. Even to self-professed stats-hating hockey observers, the power of a single number can be very strong indeed, and at the end of the day 36 points were just too much to ignore.

The Wrong Numbers

2010-11-11T22:15:00.001-05:00

I had been thinking about putting up a post on the problems of evaluating hockey players by observation, but Kent Wilson saved me the trouble with his recent comprehensive post on that very topic. I fully agree with his conclusion that subjective observation alone is inadequate in judging hockey talent. I also agree that the stats vs. scouting debate is often presented as a false dichotomy and tends to verge into strawman territory, because nobody really uses only one method or the other.

You won't find many objective analysts who claim to never watch hockey. You will, on the other hand, find many journalists and fans that will tell you that they ignore stats and rely only on their terrific scouting abilities and crystal clear memories. I find that interesting, because I'd argue that in almost every case they are simply wrong about that. They are being affected by many different variables, biases, groupthink, etc., and the evidence is pretty good that one of the strongest factors is indeed statistical performance.

I've already pointed out, for example, how GAA leaders are almost always voted to the year-end All-Star team. Similarly, Art Ross Trophy winners are almost always Hart finalists. Since the lockout year of 1994-95, every Selke Trophy winner has scored at least 20 goals, and Rod Brind'Amour was the only Selke winner with a plus/minus rating below +17. If the stat sheets weren't affecting the votes, then those are some remarkable coincidences.

The truth is that everyone relies on some numbers, whether they want to admit it or not. What drives stat guys the most crazy is when people argue that the newer advanced metrics are flawed and wrong, and then go ahead and base their judgments, often unwittingly, on traditional stats that are far worse.

One of the best examples of how people were misled by a single number is Joe Nieuwendyk's Conn Smythe in 1999. There is pretty much one reason that Nieuwendyk was named playoff MVP, and it was that he scored a record-setting 6 game-winning goals in the '99 postseason.

Was Nieuwendyk really that clutch? He did have a knack for scoring goals late when the game was tied. However, goals that break the tie aren't the only important ones. For example, if your team is trailing late then it's impossible to get the game-winner without first knotting up the score. That makes the tying goal a pretty important goal as well, even though it does not appear anywhere on the stat sheet.

One of the reasons Dallas won the Cup that year was that they were great at coming from behind, a rarity for the Dead Puck Era. The Stars were 4-4 in games where they trailed after two periods, a phenomenal record given that the other 15 playoff teams combined to go just 9-42 in the same situation. In all, Dallas scored 10 goals that tied the game in the third period in that playoff season. Somewhat strangely, Nieuwendyk's clutchness didn't seem to manifest itself when his team was losing late. He didn't score any of the goals, and only assisted on one of them.

The Stars also scored 5 goals that gave the team a two-goal lead in the third period (not including empty netters), goals that effectively sealed the victory. Again, none of those goals were scored by Nieuwendyk, and he only assisted on one.

Let's drop game-winning goals and look at a different definition of clutch scoring that takes into account both of the above situations as well. Counting all points on goals scored in the third period or overtime that either tied the game, gave Dallas the lead, or gave Dallas a two-goal lead (empty-netters excluded) gives the following scoring totals in the '99 playoffs:

Modano: 3 goals, 7 assists, 10 points
Nieuwendyk: 5 goals, 3 assists, 8 points
Langenbrunner: 5 goals, 3 assists, 8 points
Lehtinen: 5 goals, 1 assist, 6 points

Nieuwendyk wasn't any more of a clutch scorer than the other guys, he just got the recognition because of the arbitrary nature of game-winning goals. His goals helped Dallas win games, of course, but so did the goals that Modano and Lehtinen were scoring to tie the game up in the first place.

Three of Nieuwendyk's GWG and both of his OT goals came in the first six games, all of them won by Dallas against significantly inferior opponents (Edmonton and St. Louis). In the finals Nieuwendyk had just 2 goals and 1 assist while Modano's line made the difference (Modano had 7 assists in the Finals). I'm not necessarily against that, I would prefer the trophy to be awarded to the best player throughout the playoffs rather than simply the best player in the last series, but that is atypical for a Conn Smythe Trophy winner.

The final reason Nieuwendyk never should have won it over Modano is because Modano played a way tougher role. We don't have play-by-play records or shift charts from the '99 playoffs, but I'm sure they would have shown Ken Hitchcock matching Mike Modano or Guy Carbonneau up against the opposition's best players. I bet the majority of Nieuwendyk's goals and points in those playoffs came against the other team's second, third or fourth lines.

Modano was a big part of the Stars' 90.5% penalty kill, a PK that ran two forward pairings almost exclusively (Carbonneau/Keane and Modano/Lehtinen). Modano averaged 2:59 per game on the PK, compared to Nieuwendyk's 0:04. At even strength, Modano played 17:29 per game while Nieuwendyk played just 14:43. On the power play the two were closer (4:11 for Modano compared to 3:38 for Nieuwendyk), which again reflects how Nieuwendyk was used in an offensive role.

Modano played more minutes, played tougher minutes, played better defence, scored more points on clutch goals, scored more overall and carried the team in the Finals, yet somehow Nieuwendyk was the MVP? That does not compute. Ask anybody who voted on it and they'll tell you how Nieuwendyk brought leadership and was clutch, but I'd bet that what was really shaping their perceptions was the 6 GWG. The Conn Smythe should have gone to either Modano or Buffalo's Dominik Hasek. With Ed Belfour in the mix as well, I think Nieuwendyk would have been, at best, a distant #4 on my MVP list.

The moral of the story is that, no matter how much of an anti-stats hard line you profess, the numbers are going to affect your perceptions anyway, either directly or indirectly. After all, it's pretty tough to watch a hockey game on TV without being fed a bunch of numbers, or hearing the broadcasters talking about so-and-so's scoring totals and making claims about players that are largely based on their stats to date. Given all that, you might as well be aware of the right stats, rather than being misled by traditional numbers.

Top 5 and Top 10 Save Percentages

2010-10-31T19:00:00.000-04:00

This is a bit of a data dump post, but I wanted to post the results after compiling the number of top 5 and top 10 save percentage finishes for goalies in the post-expansion era. Note that evidence suggests that team effects were greater in the 1970s and 1980s than in the 1990s and 2000s (see this post for example), which means that it isn't fair to directly compare, say, a goalie who played on a bad team in the 1970s or a goalie who played on a great team in the 1980s with one of today's netminders.

With that in mind here's the list, with the first number being top 5 finishes and the second the number of top tens:

Patrick Roy: 9 / 15
Tony Esposito: 8 / 12
Dominik Hasek: 9 / 11
Billy Smith: 6 / 11
Ken Dryden: 6 / 8
Bernie Parent: 6 / 8
Chico Resch: 5 / 7
John Vanbiesbrouck: 4 / 7
Roberto Luongo: 3 / 7
Rogie Vachon: 1 / 7
Martin Brodeur: 4 / 6
Ed Belfour: 4 / 6
Tom Barrasso: 4 / 6
Kelly Hrudey: 3 / 6
Dan Bouchard: 3 / 6
Andy Moog: 3 / 6
Pete Peeters: 5 / 5
Gump Worsley: 4 / 5
Jacques Plante: 3 / 5
Denis Herron: 3 / 5
Doug Favell: 3 / 5
Reggie Lemelin: 3 / 5
Curtis Joseph: 2 / 5
Cesare Maniago: 2 / 5
Mike Richter: 1 / 5
Don Beaupre: 1 / 5
Tomas Vokoun: 4 / 4
Jeff Hackett: 3 / 4
Mark Fitzpatrick: 3 / 4
Nik Khabibulin: 2 / 4
Don Edwards: 2 / 4
Miikka Kiprusoff: 2 / 4
Glen Hanlon: 2 / 4
Mike Liut: 2 / 4
Sean Burke: 1 / 4
J.S. Giguere: 1 / 4
Bob Essensa: 1 / 4
Ed Giacomin: 1 / 4
Gerry Cheevers: 1 / 4
Grant Fuhr: 1 / 4
Evgeni Nabokov: 0 / 4
Marty Turco: 3 /3
Roman Cechmanek: 3 / 3
Rolie Melanson: 3 / 3
Mike Palmateer: 2 / 3
Bunny Larocque: 2 / 3
Olaf Kolzig: 2 / 3
Ron Hextall: 2 / 3
Jose Theodore: 2 / 3
Guy Hebert: 2 / 3
Daren Puppa: 2 / 3
Manny Fernandez: 2 / 3
Tim Thomas: 2 / 3
Niklas Backstrom: 2 / 3
Bruce Gamble: 1 / 3
Glenn Hall: 1 / 3
Gilles Villemure: 1 / 3
Gilles Meloche: 1 / 3
Chris Osgood: 1 / 3
Felix Potvin: 1 / 3
Ron Tugnutt: 1 / 3
Henrik Lundqvist: 1 / 3
Ryan Miller: 1 / 3
Rick Wamsley: 1 / 3
Manny Legace: 0 / 3

As a postscript, here are the goalies with 500 career games played since expansion who did not make the cut:

Mike Vernon (2/2), Bill Ranford (0/1), Kirk McLean (0/2), Greg Millen (0/1), Jocelyn Thibault (1/1), Ken Wregget (0/1), Arturs Irbe (1/1), Gary Smith (0/0), Tommy Salo (0/0), Roger Crozier (1/2), Dwayne Roloson (2/2)

Don Cherry and Swedish Goalies

2010-10-26T07:30:00.000-04:00

One of the current goalie hotbeds is the country of Sweden. Six different Swedish netminders made their NHL debuts in either this season or last, to raise to 11 the total number of Swedes who have played in goal since the lockout. Henrik Lundqvist remains the nation's best, but this year Anders Lindback has emerged as a surprise in Nashville, Jonas Gustavsson has played well for a surprising Toronto squad, and Robin Lehner has started to make the case that he might be the future solution to Ottawa's goaltending woes. Despite all this Swedish success, the best may still be yet to come in the person of Jakob Markstrom, considered by many to be the top-rated goalie prospect in the world today.

It was not always the case, however, that the Tre Kronor produced top-level goalies. In fact, there were only a handful of Swedes who played net in the NHL in the 20th century. The entire list is as follows: Tommy Salo, Pelle Lindbergh, Tommy Soderstrom, Hardy Astrom, and Goran Hogosta.

Salo and Lindbergh are likely familiar to most hockey fans. Salo had a lengthy NHL career (526 games played), although he may unfortunately be remembered most for his gaffe against Belarus at the 2002 Olympics. Lindbergh won the 1985 Vezina Trophy, then had his career tragically cut short the following season when he died in a car crash at the age of 26.

The other three had much less memorable careers, although I suspect many Canadian hockey fans have at least a passing familiarity with the name of Hardy Astrom. Astrom played just three years in the NHL, but has achieved a level of infamy as a result of a few stories told by TV personality Don Cherry on CBC's Coach's Corner and on his personal Rock 'em Sock 'em videos.

The way Cherry tells it, Astrom was a bumbling goalie that couldn't stop soft lobs from center ice in practice. It's entirely possible that Astrom let in some stinkers, especially while getting bombarded behind the hapless Colorado Rockies defence. Still, does it make sense that a guy who represented Sweden in the 1976 Canada Cup and two other world championships and attracted enough attention to play pro hockey in North America at a time when Europeans were underrepresented in the NHL was laughably inept?

Sounds to me like this guy might just have been stigmatized by a bad goal or two at the wrong time, a la Tommy Salo. Let's see what the numbers say. Here are the results for all Colorado goalies from 1979-80 to 1980-81. Breaking it into Astrom vs. everyone else, we get the following:

Hardy Astrom: 3.76, .870
All other goalies: 4.20, .854

I'm starting to think Don Cherry may have been exaggerating just a little.

Astrom was pretty unlucky in the goal support department, because his winning percentage lagged most of his teammates. That might have led to a perception that he wasn't a "winner". Yet for all Cherry likes to rag on Astrom, the coach still gave him 49 games in net in 1979-80. Swede jokes may entertain Canadian TV audiences, but by what economists called revealed preference it is unlikely that Cherry really thought his Swedish goalie was truly that horrible, based on the coaching decisions he made with his job on the line.

The numbers suggest Astrom was likely a pretty average netminder, especially when you factor in how bad the Rockies were. I bet Cherry coached quite a few other goalies who were worse than Astrom during his tenure in the NHL, and it seems kind of unfair (but perhaps not surprising, given Cherry's general anti-European sentiment) that he seems to have picked out one Swedish guy all these years later to be the butt of his jokes.

Questioning Ed Giacomin

2010-10-19T13:30:00.000-04:00

(Like Tyler Dellow, I usually feel like I don't have much to talk about early in the season. Anything involving goalies is going to necessarily be an attempt to find meaning in impossibly small sample sizes. My posts will be mostly focused on historical items until we can be in a better position to guess at how things are shaking out.)

If you were asked to list off the easiest goalie jobs in NHL history, there would be a number of dynasty teams that would come immediately to mind. Right after those powerhouses, I think a high ranking on that list should be reserved for the starting role on an Original Six team shortly after expansion in the late '60s and early '70s. That was a position that was pretty much guaranteed to make you look better than you were.

To nobody's surprise, the teams that were already full of NHL talent dominated the expansion teams in the first few seasons after the league doubled in size. This effect lasted for quite some time as new expansion fodder kept getting tossed into the mix throughout the decade, until the late '70s when the Hawks, Leafs and Wings had fallen back into the pack and a number of expansion teams including the Flyers, Islanders, and Sabres had become legitimate contenders for the Cup.

There were 11 Hall of Fame goalies that were active during the period from 1968 to 1975, but a handful of them were at the end of their careers (Plante, Worsley, Hall, Bower, Sawchuk), and another (Billy Smith) was suffering through the growing pains on an expansion team and had yet to make his mark. That leaves Ken Dryden, Tony Esposito, Gerry Cheevers, Ed Giacomin and Bernie Parent as the goalies who had their peak in the post-expansion period.

Or, to express it in a slightly different but perhaps more meaningful way, Montreal's goalie, Chicago's goalie, Boston's goalie, New York's goalie, and Bernie Parent.

The Leafs and Red Wings might have been able to put somebody in the Hall of Fame too if they hadn't spread the workload around. Both teams used 14 different goalies in those 8 seasons, and Roy Edwards was the only one who played in over 200 games. The Leafs did have both Plante and Parent on their team at times during this period, which helped both of their resumes although both of them would have become honoured members even without their tenures in Toronto.

If team effects had the potential to create Hall of Famers, then which goalies got lucky and which ones were unlucky? I'd submit Ed Giacomin as probably the worst of the lot. If you look at the Rangers' year-by-year GAAs against Original Six teams compared to expansion teams, you start to get a sense of the lack of balance in the league:

1967-68: 2.76 vs. Original Six, 1.88 vs. Expansion
1968-69: 3.15 vs. Original Six, 1.94 vs. Expansion
1969-70: 2.80 vs. Original Six, 2.14 vs. Expansion
1970-71: 2.73 vs. Original Six, 1.98 vs. Expansion
1971-72: 3.10 vs. Original Six, 2.06 vs. Expansion
1972-73: 3.31 vs. Original Six, 2.35 vs. Expansion
1973-74: 4.26 vs. Original Six, 2.67 vs. Expansion
1974-75: 4.52 vs. Original Six, 3.07 vs. Expansion
Period Averages: 3.14 vs. Original Six, 2.34 vs. Expansion

That's a 34% increase in GAA when playing against a fellow Original Six team. The Rangers also shut out the expansion teams 39 times, compared to just 17 blankings of their older foes.

Giacomin was voted the best goalie in 1966-67, which appears to be an impressive feat given that there were still only five other teams that season. However, that was an unusual year where most of league's netminders were in platoon situations. Roger Crozier was the only other goalie who played in more than 44 games, and considering Crozier played on a much weaker Detroit team it looks like Giacomin was named the best goalie more or less by default.

Giacomin also was voted the top goalie in 1970-71, a year where he finished second in save percentage with an impressive .922. Although this was Giacomin's career year, he still never should have received that honour, not when Jacques Plante posted an incredible .944 save percentage in just 5 fewer games played. In addition, Giacomin's journeyman backup Gilles Villemure had very similar stats (2.30, .919 compared to Giacomin's 2.16, .922), which suggests that the Rangers were making it tough for the opposition to score.

In this period Giacomin got many of the typical edges of a goalie playing for a defensive, disciplined team. New York faced fewer opposing power plays than average every year between 1968 and 1975 except for 1971-72. The Rangers were also routinely among the top teams in shots prevention. Newly released shot data shows that Giacomin's career shots faced per game rate was 28.8, just 0.3 higher than Ken Dryden's career mark. Giacomin also got a ton of starts, which can be interpreted as either a fortunate opportunity or evidence of his durability, depending on your outlook.

Giacomin did not have much longevity, and he only had about 5-6 peak seasons (which with the single exception of 1966-67 came in the post-expansion period). His career save percentage of .902 exactly matched league average for the seasons he played. He was nothing special once he was shipped out from Broadway to the Red Wings. His playoff record was also decidedly mediocre. The main argument for Giacomin seems to be his award recognition. In addition to being twice named the best goalie as mentioned above, Giacomin was voted the second best goalie at season's end an additional three times. Given that he did not rank in the top 5 in the league in save percentage in any of those three campaigns, despite the advantages mentioned above, it seems reasonable to question whether he truly deserved that recognition.

When evaluating players, I think it is a fair argument to claim that someone with a Hart Trophy or an Art Ross Trophy should have an advantage over a similar player without similar award recognition. With goalies I am hesitant to give the same weighting to individual awards. The two reasons for that is that I believe writers are more likely to get the voting wrong with goalies than with forwards, and that there appears to be more of a luck element involved in a single season's worth of goaltending than for a single season by a forward. Giacomin was repeatedly recognized as one of the game's best, which could have been because he was actually one of the best or it could have been because he was an established goalie playing in a large market on one of the league's best defensive teams that profited greatly from pounding on the league's weak sisters.

As for which goalies were unlucky, I think it is extremely unlikely that Rogie Vachon was a worse goalie than Ed Giacomin. Vachon was much younger when he broke into the NHL and had a longer career, he had a better save percentage (.905) over the seasons that Giacomin also played in the NHL, he played well on more than one team, he had a better Hart Trophy voting record and he represented Canada internationally. I think it's a pretty open-and-shut case, and it makes no sense to me that Giacomin is in the Hall of Fame while Vachon is not.

In a very unbalanced competitive environment, I think it is right to at least question any goalie who only had elite success for a short period of time in a single team environment. It is possible that they had a short peak and then tailed off, but I think the more probable explanation is that they had team advantages during a certain portion of their career that they did not have at other times.

The Best Calendar Year Ever?

2010-10-12T19:45:00.001-04:00

Recently two different publications, one by Hockey Night in Canada, the other by The Hockey News, have come out with historical goalie rankings. Both of them made what I consider to be a very serious error in underrating Dominik Hasek. I've been beating the drum for Hasek pretty much since day one in this space, not because I am a personal fan of him or any of his teams, but because it is impossible to get deep into goalie statistics without being impressed by the ridiculous level of dominance Hasek displayed in the 1990s.

So here we go again, another chance for me to throw out numbers supporting the great Czech netminder, trying to properly illustrate the unrighteousness of ranking the Dominator as the 5th best goalie of all-time, as THN does, or the 3rd best goalie since 1967 (a la HNIC).

In the calendar year of 1998, including the regular season, playoffs and Olympics, Dominik Hasek had the following stat line: 54-20-14, 1.75, .943, plus 16 shutouts. He averaged nearly 1 shutout every 5 games, playing mostly on a Buffalo Sabres team that was the worst team in the league at shot prevention in 1997-98 and 5th worst in 1998-99. The Sabres' win threshold over those two seasons was .917, meaning that they needed a very good goalie just to be a .500 team. To further stack the deck against the Dominator, the Sabres took more penalties than average in both seasons as well.

The league average save percentage in the regular season was around .906 in that period. In the 1998 playoffs, all goalies other than Hasek combined for an average of .912. Playoff averages usually rise slightly because teams only play their starting goalies. A difference of .006 suggests that the scoring environment was pretty similar between the regular season and playoffs. In the Olympics, the average save percentage was .904 (that's not including Kazakhstan, which got completely shelled in every game).

I'll take .906 as the league average and assume Hasek faced average shot quality, was not impacted by scorer bias and did not play a role in his team's shot prevention (or at least that the effects of all three ended up netting out to zero). Based on those assumptions, Hasek was about 120 goals above average in a 12 month span. Considering he did it in minutes equivalent to 90.3 full games, Hasek averaged 1.33 goals better than average per game for an entire year, during a time period when the average NHL team scored 2.60 goals per game.

That is why Hasek should be talked about among Gretzky, Orr, Lemieux and Howe when people are discussing the greatest peaks in hockey history. It's certainly not conventional wisdom to put Hasek up in the stratosphere with those legends, but there is a numerical case for it. It's possible that, like Hasek, Gretzky had some crazy calendar year that was better than any of his full seasons (maybe 1983, which included most of his ridiculous 51-game point streak), but his most impressive full season may have been 1984-85. Counting regular season, playoffs and the Canada Cup, the Great One scored 95 goals and 172 assists for 267 points and a +126 rating in 106 games.

That stat line probably looks way more impressive than Hasek's to most hockey fans, but a lot of that is probably because we have more intuitive sense about the level forwards produce at than the level goalies produce at. We know that 267 points is far beyond the curve for forwards, but while we realize that .943 is great, we may not have a sense of exactly how great (adjusted for scoring environment, it would be the equivalent of Patrick Roy in the '93 playoffs, or J.S. Giguere in the '03 postseason, for 90 games in a row). Depending on your assumptions about his ice time, the strength of his teammates, Gretzky's defensive ability and the production of an average forward, it's possible to argue that Hasek contributed more on a per-game basis than even the Great One.

For example, let's assume that Gretzky had average ice time, was average defensively and played with average linemates (two of those are clearly false, but bear with me). Since Hasek was being compared to the average goalie, let's use the average first-line forward as the baseline for Gretzky. In 1984-85 the average first-liner, excluding Gretzky himself, averaged 1.09 points per game, which equates to 116 points in 106 games. As a result, we can conclude that Gretzky scored 151 points above average, 1.42 points per game higher than the average forward. That is just slightly better than Hasek's mark even based on the prior assumptions and giving Gretzky sole credit for all of his points. Take into account the fact that he played on the same line as Jari Kurri and the same team as Paul Coffey, factor in Gretzky's heavy ice time, and maybe he doesn't beat the Dominator after all.

That's just a quick-and-dirty method, we could also use a metric that is designed to measure value such as GVT. Gretzky had a 59.1 GVT rating in the regular season and playoffs in 1984-85. Hasek averaged 54.0 GVT in 1997-98 and 1998-99, and added an additional 13.6 in the 1998 playoffs. Including the Olympics and looking just at that calendar year, Hasek probably had a GVT over 70. That means that both in total and on a per-game basis, Hasek's numbers in this period would easily beat not only Gretzky's best season but also the best seasons of Bobby Orr and Mario Lemieux (although, to be fair, GVT typically does rank the top goalies above the top skaters).

Having said all that, Gretzky's peak is extremely impressive because he was able to maintain it for such a long period of time (averaging 203 points per year over a six-season stretch, plus another 31 per year in the playoffs). Hasek was amazing throughout the '90s but I think most would agree that 1998 was his absolute peak, which means that he was probably both playing out of his mind while also having some luck in terms of having the puck hitting him. If you're rating careers then no doubt Gretzky wins, and if you're rating extended primes than there's a good case for the Great One as well. However, for one game, at the absolute height of their respective powers, I'd definitely think twice about it. At the very least I think Hasek down to the next goalie is a bigger gap than Gretzky to Lemieux.

Some people will probably tell you that Gretzky was on a different level than Hasek because the Great One was in a class of his own far ahead of the rest of the league, while Hasek was only just a bit better than Brodeur and Roy. Those people are flat-out wrong. This is what Hasek's main rivals were doing over the same 12 months, see if you think any of them are even close:

Roy: 32-32-6, 2.36, .910, 6 SO
Brodeur: 39-22-11, 2.12, .909, 8 SO
Belfour: 45-18-7, 1.87, .919, 6 SO
Joseph: 41-32-3, 2.38, .914, 9 SO

For an even better expression of the relevant difference, here are the goals against per 30 shots numbers for those four guys and Hasek:

Dominik Hasek: 1.71
Ed Belfour: 2.43
Curtis Joseph: 2.58
Patrick Roy: 2.70
Martin Brodeur: 2.73

Belfour may have been the second-best goalie that year, and he was still dusted by Hasek. Remember that Belfour was playing on the back-to-back President's Trophy-winning Dallas Stars, a terrific defensive team coached by Ken Hitchcock that also took fewer penalties than average. Even if you don't like save percentage or you think that there are other major factors in play like puckhandling, just compare those win/loss records for Belfour on the best team in the league (.875 win threshold) against Hasek on the overmatched Sabres and the underdog Czech Olympic team:

Belfour: 45-18-7, .693
Hasek: 54-20-14, .693

At the very least, I think it's fair to say that the number of players in league history that have had that big of an effect on winning can be counted on one hand.

In my mind it will be a travesty if Hasek is remembered as the third-best goalie of his generation, which is a perception that a lot of media-types are currently doing their best to entrench. In terms of actual performance, the Dominator really does stand alone.

SRS

2010-10-05T14:00:00.001-04:00

Hockey Reference has a metric called the Simple Rating System (SRS) that is designed to measure team strength in terms of predicted goal differential per game. I haven't yet run the complete numbers to see exactly how accurate it is in terms of predicting playoff results, but I do know from hacking around a bit with the results that teams that have a large edge in SRS over their opponents are much more likely to win their playoff matchups.

It appears that the threshold where victory becomes highly likely for the favoured team is when the SRS gap between competing teams is .3 or more. Since SRS claims to be a measure of a team's per-game goal differential above average, that is the equivalent of a difference in goal differential of about +25, which equates to a difference of about 4 wins over 82 games in terms of "true talent" (i.e. the rating is designed to adjust for schedule strength and to remove some of the effects of variance over the course of a single season, such as a team that wins a lot of shootouts or close games).

Even the best goalies in recent times built their playoff records largely on series victories where their team had an SRS rating that was .3 or more ahead of the opposition. Here are playoff series win/loss records for the consensus top 4 goalies of the last two decades split by the strength of their teammates and opponents:

Patrick Roy:
On teams >.3 better than the opposition: 21-2
On teams >.3 worse than the opposition: 2-3
Playoff series against all other opponents: 10-8

Martin Brodeur:
On teams >.3 better than the opposition: 15-2
On teams >.3 worse than the opposition: 0-1
Playoff series against all other opponents: 5-9

Ed Belfour:
On teams >.3 better than the opposition: 12-2
On teams >.3 worse than the opposition: 1-4
Playoff series against all other opposition: 6-6

Dominik Hasek:
On teams >.3 better than the opposition: 5-0
On teams >.3 worse than the opposition: 0-3
Playoff series against all other opposition: 7-4

Combined results:
On teams >.3 better than the opposition: 53-6
On teams >.3 worse than the opposition: 3-11
Playoff series against all other opposition: 28-27

Playing on a much superior team, these goalies combined to win 90% of the time. When playing on a much weaker team, they only managed to win 20% of the time. In all other series it was essentially a coin flip.

It should be noted that the SRS rating is based on regular season performance that includes the contribution of the goaltender themselves. Keep in mind that in some of these situations, the goalie's own play was largely responsible for lifting their team ahead of the opposition. For example, some of the teams had lower win thresholds than their opponents yet higher SRS ratings, which would be an indicator of quality goaltending.

Also, just because the goalie is playing on the better team does not mean they weren't playing well, or were only overseeing 8-0 blowouts. It is important to avoid the common bias in favour of goalies on great teams, but we shouldn't overcompensate by never giving any credit to any goalie with decent teammates. Upsets can easily happen in seven game playoff series. A good team with a good goalie in net becomes tough to beat, as even when the team is off its game the goaltender can sometimes come to its rescue.

As a point of comparison, Chris Osgood was 12-5 in series where his team had a significant advantage. I'm not saying Osgood was to blame for all of those losses, but poor goaltending, or perhaps an average goalie who goes on an unlucky streak, can sometimes sink even a very good team. The high winning percentage in the mismatched series above does seem to indicate strong goaltending, although certainly the rest of the team played a huge role as well.

As an footnote, here are the numbers for Curtis Joseph:
On teams >.3 better than the opposition: 2-3
On teams >.3 worse than the opposition: 2-6
Playoff series against all other opposition: 7-4

In the latter two categories, Joseph's record stacks up against any of the other guys. The main difference was that he did not have nearly as many chances to pound weaker opponents as Roy, Brodeur and Belfour. Cujo was also quite unlucky in terms of goal support, as the Red Wings' failure to score on Giguere in '03 and Kiprusoff in '04 ended up being the main reason for Detroit's downfall in two of his three losses against weaker opposition.

Some Help from the Official Scorer?

2010-10-02T09:30:00.000-04:00

Pekka Rinne, career:
at Home: 42-17-5, 2.21, .924, 29.12 SA/60
on Road: 20-15-4, 2.87, .897, 27.84 SA/60

Those splits certainly make one at least a bit skeptical about whether Rinne's save percentage is being accurately reported in his home rink in the Music City, and whether we can therefore rely on those numbers to accurately reflect his performance. Nashville has been one of the places suspected of a shot recording bias (for more info see Tom Awad or JLikens), which increases the probability that there may be overcounting going on in Rinne's favour.

Unfortunately, this case is not entirely clear cut, because former Predators goalie Dan Ellis doesn't have the same extreme splits. In fact, Ellis actually has a higher career save percentage on the road despite playing all but one game of his career for the same Predators team as Rinne:

Dan Ellis, career:
at Home: 18-16-5, 2.59, .910, 28.82 SA/60
on Road: 32-26-5, 2.68, .913, 30.78 SA/60

Backup goalies can sometimes have skewed numbers because of relief appearances, but even after taking out the 12 games where Ellis came in off the bench, the pattern persists:

at Home: 18-15-4, 2.57, .913, 29.58 SA/60
on Road: 30-22-4, 2.65, .916, 31.62 SA/60

This is a fairly small sample for both Rinne and Ellis, and I expect that some of the effect is simple random variance. It is likely that the .027 difference between Rinne's home and road performance has been a bit of a statistical quirk, as has his good fortune to face almost 4 fewer shots against per game than Dan Ellis while on the road, but I'm still slightly suspicious of the official scorer in Nashville. It will be interesting to see if similar results continue this season with Ellis in Tampa and Rinne expected to once again be the main man in the crease in Nashville.

The 1993 Canadiens in OT

2010-09-29T08:30:00.000-04:00

Anyone who followed the 1993 NHL playoffs remembers that the Montreal Canadiens had an exceptional record in overtime. The Habs were 10-1 that year in games that went past 60 minutes, and even that one loss tends to get forgotten since it came in the Habs' first playoff game. As a result, the more oft-cited statistic is "Montreal won 10 straight playoff overtime games in 1993".

The journalistic narrative that year was that Patrick Roy singlehandedly won the Cup. Given that Roy didn't score any of Montreal's 10 overtime goals, any reasonable person would have to conclude that there was more to it than that. Roy's contribution was surely significant, but how much of the OT streak was a result of his play, and how much was earned by the shooters in front of him?

The Hockey Summary Project now has the 1993 numbers posted, which means that we now have access to shot data that might help answer that question.

In 11 overtime sessions in 1993 Montreal was outshot 66-59, yet scored 10 goals to their opposition's 1. That's a 16.9% shooting percentage and a .985 save percentage. Needless to say, that is a remarkable run (it is not often you see a PDO number of 1.15, even in a very small sample).

The league average save percentage in overtime in 1993 was .907. Montreal wasn't really affecting that average much since the total save percentage in overtime periods involving the Canadiens was .912, it was just heavily skewed in the Habs' favour.

If they had the league average OT shooting and save percentages Montreal would have been expected to score 5.5 goals and allow 6 in overtime. That means they outperformed their expected goal differential by 9.5 goals, of which 4.5 were the shooters outperforming and 5.0 was the goalie outperforming.

That gives approximately a 50-50 split in total contribution between the goalie and the shooters. Without question St. Patrick was great that spring, but even the best goalies need help if they want to win anything. Contrary to popular myth, Montreal had a very good team in front of him, and the Habs were able to increase their odds by managing to avoid the league's top teams in their playoff bracket. It was still a very heavy dose of good fortune that Montreal was able to be that opportunistic in those high-leverage situations, as without the Canadiens' great record in close games they probably would not have won the Stanley Cup.

What To Expect From: Jimmy Howard

2010-09-27T08:30:00.001-04:00

If I had to bet on one starting goalie from last year posting a lower save percentage in 2010-11 than he did in 2009-10, I'd pick Jimmy Howard.

All the signs are there for a regression. First of all, Howard outperformed on special teams. He had a very good save percentage on the penalty kill (.905, 4th among starting goalies), and he faced a low percentage of shots against on the PK to begin with (16.0%). He only let in one shorthanded goal on 50 shots against while Detroit was on the power play. Put all that together, and the result is that Howard's even strength save percentage (.925) was nearly equal to his overall save percentage (.924), something that is rare and generally not sustainable in the long run.

For any goalie with essentially one NHL season under his belt, it's best to look at their minor league performance to see if there is a track record of success. Howard played four full seasons in the AHL from 2005-06 to 2008-09, where he compiled a .911 save percentage on 5,324 shots. That's not bad, but it's nothing that suggests future NHL stardom either. Howard's backups combined for .895 on 4,171 shots, so perhaps there is some evidence that Grand Rapids was not the best defensive team or took a lot of penalties or has a miserly official scorer, but I still don't think Howard's minor league performance is at a sufficient level to foreshadow a future elite NHL starter.

None of Howard's AHL seasons were more than .005 above or below that .911. There's not a clear improvement trend in his numbers, which means that I wouldn't put it at all out of the realm of possibility that he might be a similar goalie in skill level now to what he was the age of 23 or 24. His ascension probably had as much or more to do with spots opening up ahead of him in the organization as with the development in his own game.

It's pretty obvious that the Red Wings themselves didn't think Howard was anything special until very recently. Why else would they have signed Ty Conklin in the summer of 2008 to back up Chris Osgood during the 2008-09 season? Howard was 24 years old with three full seasons in Grand Rapids under his belt at that point, and his own team still didn't rate him as good enough to be an NHL backup. Having said that, the Red Wings are known for their patience in developing prospects, so perhaps it was entirely a matter of maximizing Howard's playing time, but regardless he didn't exactly force his way into the NHL either.

I'm not willing to make the argument that there are strong team effects boosting Howard's performance without a lot more data, but on the other hand I don't rate playing behind Nicklas Lidstrom, Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg to be one of the league's toughest assignments either.

Excluding the 2009-10 regular season, Howard's career NHL record is .912 on 614 shots. That's a tiny sample, but I think it's still probably more representative of Howard's true skill. Puck Prospectus' VUKOTA has Howard projected at a .914 save percentage next year. Guys who have great years are likely to regress somewhat the following year, that's just basic sports statistics. If they don't have an established track record of success either, then the indicator lights are flashing even more strongly. I'd say Howard is more likely to have a below-average save percentage (say, .905-.910) than he is to match his .924 this coming season.

There is of course some small chance that Howard either legitimately became great or his run of luck continues and he remains near the top of the save percentage leaderboard, but it's certainly not the way to bet. It will be interesting to see whether his performance over the next couple of seasons indicates that he is anything special or just another guy at the NHL level.

What to Expect From Steve Mason

2010-09-23T08:30:00.002-04:00

The Columbus Blue Jackets and Steve Mason recently came to an agreement on a two-year extension for the 2011-12 and 2012-13 seasons, at an annual cap hit of $2.9 million.

This deal doesn't make sense to me. First of all, the number seems high relative to Mason's comparables, particularly Carey Price's cap hit of $2.75 million. Secondly, and probably more importantly, I don't think the Blue Jackets really know yet what they have in Mason, who followed his good but overrated 2008-09 season with a pretty weak 2009-10.

Steve Mason's career save percentage in the NHL, regular season and playoffs combined, is .907. That's a below average number in today's scoring environment. I will cut him some slack because he did break into the league at a very young age, and it is entirely possible that he will continue to develop into a goalie with significantly better numbers down the road. But that's why I think this season is pretty important in terms of pegging Mason. It's his third year in the NHL, he's 22, and by all accounts he worked hard on his game over the summer. If I was running the Blue Jackets, I'd tell Mason to prove to me that he deserves to get paid, rather than giving him a sweet deal coming off of a down season. Maybe Mason breaks out and it costs me an extra $500K per season to buy his remaining RFA years, but in the cap era I think it's better to avoid costly mistakes than to pay market value for guys who deserve it.

A lot of people talk about consistency in goaltending, and often it is debatable whether they are actually talking about the variance in the goalie's performance or whether they are simply criticizing or complimenting the goalie's ability. So far in his career, I think it is quite fair to say that Steve Mason has been inconsistent. Kent Wilson at The Score put together an interesting graph of the game-by-game results so far in Mason's career. In 120 career starts, Mason has 15 shutouts and 13 games with an .800 save percentage or worse. That's a shutout percentage of 13% and an awful outing rate of 11%, which are both well above the averages of 6.5% and 7.7% respectively.

I've heard a few explanations given for Mason's results last season. Some questioned his conditioning, others his mental toughness. Teams were shooting high glove on him with great success, which suggests that he needs to work on his technique. Probably a lot of it was simply higher-than-normal random variance resulting from a small sample size. Once again, to me that's a reason to be cautious. If you focus on his shutouts and great games and the way he broke into the league by storm in late 2008, it's probably easy to think that Mason just needs to fix a few things in his game and he is headed for greatness, but that's an overly optimistic viewpoint.

Mason is particularly interesting because he's a guy that has been rated highly by the scouts throughout his career, often perhaps higher than his numbers would suggest he actually deserved. He got drafted in the third round despite not playing very much as a 17-year old in the OHL, he started for the Canadian world junior team ahead of Jonathan Bernier, he was invited to the Team Canada Olympic camp last summer, and he won the Calder and was nominated for the Vezina in 2009. His new contract was mostly based on projection, which again likely relied heavily on input from the team's scouts. Mason is big and moves well, he looks like a butterfly goalie should look, but unless he's actually stopping the puck at a high rate that doesn't translate into helping his team win hockey games.

Columbus is making a bet that they didn't need to make (or at least one they didn't need to make right now), and they likely parted with more money than they needed to, given comparable contracts. I'll be interested to see how it works out for them. I think we'll know a more about Steve Mason after this season, but as of right now I'm not convinced he's an above-average NHL goalie, either now or in the near future. It's a pretty safe bet to expect him to rebound from last year, but I'd still be a bit surprised if he repeated his rookie season mark of .916, especially with Ken Hitchcock no longer behind the bench.

Ken Dryden's Backups

2010-09-21T09:00:00.000-04:00

One of the great benefits of the Hockey Summary Project has been filling in the gaps in the save percentage record going all the way back to 1952-53. That greatly expands the potential analytical work that can be done on hockey goalies throughout history before the NHL began officially tracking shots and saves in 1983-84.

I got the idea to run the numbers on Montreal backup goalies in the 1970s after following along with the terrific work being done by Black Dog Hates Skunks on the 1972 Summit Series. The scoring chance numbers being compiled there make a pretty good case that Canada was the superior team, but that perhaps the biggest reason the series ended up being close was lackluster goaltending by Ken Dryden.

It shouldn't be too surprising that it would be easier than normal to play goalie on a team that had Larry Robinson, Serge Savard and Guy Lapointe on defence in an unbalanced league further ravaged by player losses to the WHA. The question is how much? Here are the numbers:

Denis Herron:
Montreal: .901 on 2178 SA
Elsewhere: .889 on 9412 SA

Phil Myre:
Montreal: .904 on 1432 SA
Elsewhere: .881 on 11317 SA

Rogie Vachon:
Montreal: .912 on 5391 SA
Elsewhere: .890 on 16221 SA

Michel Plasse:
Montreal: .888 on 866 SA
Elsewhere: .880 on 8015 SA

Wayne Thomas:
Montreal: .906 on 1424 SA
Elsewhere: .886 on 5563 SA

Bunny Larocque:
Montreal: .894 on 5860 SA
Elsewhere: .861 on 1829 SA

Average save percentage for Dryden backups in Montreal: .902
Average save percentage for Dryden backups elsewhere: .885

I don't think anybody should be surprised by the confirmation that being the Habs' netminder in the 1970s was a pretty sweet gig.

That second number is actually even lower if you weight the other goalies' save percentages based on how much they played in Montreal, although Larocque's numbers have a big effect there since he makes up such a large part of the sample and has a comparatively low amount of playing time outside Montreal.

It's possible that the difference between some of these goalies is somewhat exaggerated as they would have been more likely to face expansion teams as a backup in Montreal and more likely to face the league's best teams (including the Canadiens themselves) as a starter in Pittsburgh or Kansas City or wherever else they played. It's not always an apples-to-apples comparison either because some of these guys were on their way up or their way down when they went through Montreal. Still it's a six goalie sample that supports what we already know: that the Canadiens had such a strong defence. On top of that, the Habs also did not take many penalties, which would be a further benefit for the team's goalies.

If we adjust Dryden's numbers based on the above difference, his career .921 becomes .907. That remains a very good number, given that the league average over that period was .893, but that certainly puts Dryden in the conversation with Tony Esposito (.912 over the same stretch) and Bernie Parent (.914 in the same seasons on a much more heavily penalized team) for the title of the best goalie of the 1970s.

The Era of Bargain Goalies

2010-09-16T14:02:00.000-04:00

After the past offseason, I feel like I should be changing my handle to The Not-Quite-So-Contrarian Goaltender. A number of NHL teams came around to what stat guys have been preaching for a while now, that you shouldn't commit big bucks to the position because there is little margin in goaltending these days and the supply of decent goalies currently exceeds the demand.

Given the economic realities and the nature of the game at the moment, it is simply the smart team-building move to avoid committing big cash to any goalie that hasn't already demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that he is a difference-maker. That's not great news for the financial plans of goaltenders or prospects aspiring to make the NHL one day (perhaps leading to a lot more Dan Ellis Problems), but that's just the way it is. That message is spreading around the league, from the Hawks walking away from Antti Niemi to the Sharks cutting ties with Evgeni Nabokov to the Canadiens choosing to trade rather than pay their playoff hero Jaroslav Halak.

I've seen some dismiss this as merely the typical rush to copycat the most recent Stanley Cup winner, but I'd certainly dispute that argument. The signs of a goalie glut have been there for a while now, and it's been 7 seasons since a team won a Cup with a Hall of Fame goalie. The five starting goalies with championship rings since 2006 have an average post-lockout save percentage of .906. The league average over that period has been .907.

Average goaltending is good enough these days for a team that has quality in the rest of their roster. Given that, it's not at all surprising that the market price of goalies has been dropping in the salary cap era. The blueprint for many teams is to invest in the guys up front to try to assemble a lineup that can outchance the opposition. That alone should be enough to get into the playoffs and maybe even win a round or two against a weaker opponent, and from that point it's just a matter of crossing their fingers and hoping to get the hot goaltending and/or shooting luck needed to get their hands on the Cup.

I've been busy over the summer working on the Hockey Prospectus annual and other projects, but should be back on a regular posting schedule with training camps starting up around the league.

Goals Against Per 30 Shots

2010-06-24T19:00:00.004-04:00

I'm always looking out for different ways to express goalie performance, and ran across an interesting one that I'd never seen before while going through the archives at Tom Tango's Inside the Book blog. He wrote a brief Wall Street Journal article that expressed goals against average in terms of goals against per 30 shots, rather than goals against per 60 minutes of play. That gives a metric that is pretty much just a translation of save percentage (GA/30 = (1 - Sv%) * 30), but the advantage is that it results in figures that look like goals against averages. GAAs are more familiar and intuitive for most people to understand than save percentages, and allow a better sense of the actual difference between goalie performance on a per-game basis.

There is one slight tweak I would suggest to Tango's number, and that is to adjust for special teams. I'd suggest calculating even strength goals against per 24 shots and goals against per 6 shots on the penalty kill, which reflects the typical 80/20 split between non-PK and PK shots, and then adding those two numbers together to get a special teams adjusted goals against per 30 shots number.

Here are the league's top 20 goalies last season based on this metric (min. 35 starts):

1. Tuukka Rask, Boston: 2.17

2. Ryan Miller, Buffalo: 2.21

3. Jaroslav Halak, Montreal: 2.26

4. Evgeni Nabokov, San Jose: 2.34

5. Tomas Vokoun, Florida: 2.36

5. Ilya Bryzgalov, Phoenix: 2.36

7. Jimmy Howard, Detroit: 2.37

8. Henrik Lundqvist, N.Y. Rangers: 2.41

9. Jonas Hiller, Anaheim: 2.44

10. Miikka Kiprusoff, Calgary: 2.45

11. Craig Anderson, Colorado: 2.50

12. Cam Ward, Carolina: 2.53

13. Tim Thomas, Boston: 2.57

14. Chris Mason, St. Louis: 2.60

15. Johan Hedberg, Atlanta: 2.61

16. Martin Brodeur, New Jersey: 2.63

17. Roberto Luongo, Vancouver: 2.64

18. Marty Turco, Dallas: 2.65

19. Antti Niemi, Chicago: 2.67

20. Jose Theodore, Washington: 2.68

I think by the majority of measures Miller was a deserving Vezina winner and First Team All-Star, so kudos to the voters this year for getting it right.

Shot Recording in the NHL

2010-06-07T18:25:00.003-04:00

Shot recording bias is a topic that I have always wanted to look at but haven't yet got around to, until my latest article over at Puck Prospectus. I think it is something that has a real impact on goalies around the league and that we need to avoid rating goalies based on rink effects.

I use the zone time metric in my analysis, which unfortunately limits me to a three year period almost a decade ago. It would have been nice to have a larger sample size, and to try to look at shot effects in today's NHL, but alas the NHL decided to discontinue tracking zone time after the 2001-02 season.

Special Teams Play: Luck or Skill?

2010-05-27T11:00:00.001-04:00

There is a Vezina Trophy winner hidden in the following table of even strength save percentage leaders from one of the seasons in the last decade. See if you can spot him:

1. Goalie A, .934
2. Goalie B, .931
3. Goalie C, .930
4. Goalie D, .929
5. Goalie E, .929
6. Goalie F, .929
7. Goalie G, .925

Obviously it's not the guy at the top of the list, because that would be too easy and I wouldn't be asking the question in the first place. It's not the guy at the bottom of the list either, I only included him because he is a future Hall of Famer. That leaves the goalies in slots 2 through 6, who have nearly identical save percentages. None of these goalies are backups who got lucky for a few months, they are all their team's clear #1 starter. Goalie E played in 53 games while the rest played between 58 and 67.

Let's add in their save percentages on special teams, and the % of the shots faced that came on special teams:

1. Goalie A: .934 EV, .897 ST, 22.6% on ST
2. Goalie B: .931 EV, .931 ST, 18.5% on ST
3. Goalie C: .930 EV, .889 ST, 23.6% on ST
4. Goalie D: .929 EV, .882 ST, 23.8% on ST
5. Goalie E: .929 EV, .888 ST, 20.6% on ST
6. Goalie F: .929 EV, .877 ST, 25.0% on ST
7. Goalie G: .925 EV, .884 ST, 23.5% on ST

Now I think it's pretty obvious who won the Vezina. Not only that, but he also won the Hart Trophy. Goalie B is Jose Theodore, and the year is 2001-02. The other goalies, in order, are Patrick Roy, Sean Burke, Evgeni Nabokov, J.S. Giguere, Roberto Luongo and Dominik Hasek.

Did Theodore deserve his awards that year? That all depends on how you assess his special teams performance, whether you consider it to be a result of his skill or whether it was mostly luck or random chance or the play of his team's PK unit. You can make the argument that Theodore was the most valuable goalie that year because he faced many more shots against than any of the other goalies behind Montreal's porous defence, but there's not too much evidence to suggest that he was better at even strength than the other goalies who had almost identical rates.

I think Theodore had a career year in 2001-02, but that he still was pretty fortunate on special teams. It's possible that Theodore played better in certain game situations than other goalies and therefore was actually the best that year, but I'm not entirely convinced. The other goalies listed above almost all have much better track records than Theodore. I wouldn't say that Theodore's season was one of the weaker Vezina-winning seasons, as finishing second in EV SV% is still an impressive result, but I would say it is the most "smoke and mirrors" .930+ save percentage season that I am aware of.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that early-career Jose Theodore must have been among the luckiest special teams goalies in league history. In Theodore's first four seasons he stopped 89.3% of the shots he faced on the penalty kill. Since then, his PK SV% has dipped to a mere .850.

That might be attributable at least in part to a decline in Theodore's performance or the play of the team in front of him, but his performance on the power play was luckier still. In his first five seasons in the NHL, Jose Theodore stopped 321 out of 333 shots against while his team had the man advantage. That's a .964 save percentage in a situation where the league average was .917. In the year of his Vezina glory in 2001-02, Theodore peaked with a perfect 69-for-69 on power plays.

This year's Vezina is also likely going to be won by a special teams overachiever. Here are the numbers for this year's Vezina nominees:

Ryan Miller: .928 EV, .929 ST, 19.4% ST
Ilya Bryzgalov: .927 EV, .896 ST, 22.0% ST
Martin Brodeur: .924 EV, .873 ST, 15.7% ST

Here are the same statistics for several other goalies, all of whom had EV SV% equal to or better than Miller in 2009-10:

Tomas Vokoun: .937 EV, .873 ST, 19.2% ST
Tuukka Rask: .937 EV, .906 ST, 19.1% ST
Jaroslav Halak: .933 EV, .885 ST, 18.8% ST
Jonas Hiller: .930 EV, .874 ST, 20.5% ST
Henrik Lundqvist: .929 EV, .886 ST, 18.7% ST
Evgeni Nabokov: .928 EV, .900 ST, 22.1% ST
Miikka Kiprusoff: .928 EV, .888 ST, 21.0% ST

I think it was actually a pretty tight race for the top goalie this season, which is interesting since Miller has probably had the Vezina wrapped up since Christmas. I'm very interested to see how Miller does next season. I think it's a pretty safe bet to expect a great deal of regression to the mean in his special teams totals. I'm not saying he's a Jose Theodore, but I'm also not anointing him the best goalie in the world yet either.

This is not to say that special teams play is pure randomness. It can sometimes seem that way over a short sample, for example a playoff series or two, but PK save percentages generally correlate with 5 on 5 save percentages over multi-year samples. The problem is that typically only 1 in 5 shots come on the penalty kill, which means that evaluating a goalie based on single-season penalty kill performance is roughly the equivalent of evaluating a goalie's overall performance based on 12-15 games. As these playoffs have shown, anybody can run hot or cold over a short stretch like that.

In the long run goalies should be rewarded for persistently strong performance on the penalty kill, but results should be viewed skeptically over a single season. We don't want to be awarding the Vezina every year to the goalie who was the luckiest on the penalty kill, but we also should give some credit to a goalie who was excellent while his team was shorthanded. That makes it difficult for analysis.

Streaks

2010-05-19T11:30:00.000-04:00

Here are the best and worst 14-game save percentage streaks during the 2009-10 regular season for each of remaining final four teams:

Philadelphia: .936 and .870
Montreal: .943 and .882
Chicago: .937 and .874
San Jose: .944 and .887

And the same thing for seven game series:

Philadelphia: .946 and .857
Montreal: .952 and .871
Chicago: .955 and .844
San Jose: .967 and .853

The similarity in range illustrates again how the margins are very small in goaltending. Over a short sample the skill element of goaltending can be completely lost in the noise of whether the opposing shooters are missing, the puck is hitting him through screens and traffic, or whether he happens to be in peak form or not. Most teams will have at least one streak of seven games or more where their team save percentage is .940 or better, yet analysts are repeatedly stunned when some lesser goalie hits that mark or a star goalie sees his numbers dive to sub-.900 levels over the course of a playoff series.

With the Canadiens' shooting and save percentages taking a clobbering in back-to-back shutout losses to the Flyers, I think we have a new leader in the clubhouse for the luckiest team in the playoffs. With an 11.8% shooting percentage and a .933 save percentage Philadelphia is absolutely rocking the percentages. Take a look at the PDO numbers (shooting percentage plus save percentage) for the teams that are left:

Philadelphia: 105.1
Chicago: 102.2
Montreal: 101.2
San Jose: 98.5

The only way the Flyers can likely compete with the Western champ is if the pucks keep going in and staying out at ridiculous rates. If Michael Leighton can keep his even-strength save percentage in the .980 range then that should probably do it, but unfortunately the winds of chance tend to be fickle, as the Canadiens are finding out. We don't know how the bounces are going to shake out for the rest of the playoffs, but it's probably fair to say that barring some ridiculous streak occurring everything looks lined up for the end of a long Cup drought in Chicago.

Shot Quality and the Montreal Canadiens

2010-05-14T18:36:00.003-04:00

I fooled around with tracking shot quality in last year's playoffs, using shot charts to try to get a sense of where teams were shooting from. One of the most interesting sets of numbers that I happened across was at CBS Sportsline, where they track where a shot was targeted on goal (e.g. low glove, low blocker, five-hole, high glove or high blocker).

This data showed that high shots were much more likely to go in than low shots. The problem was that it was very unevenly done. Some games had no high shots recorded at all, others had just a few, while others seemed like they had a more reasonable number. I ended up just filing it away as something to potentially check on if I was trying to assess the shot quality of a particular team or series of games.

A lot of people are trying to explain why the Montreal Canadiens are having so much success this postseason, and one of the factors they typically point to is that the team is forcing their opponents to shoot from the outside. Often people talk about shot quality when they want to try to justify why one team is running hot with the percentages. In the long run teams tend to converge to the average. However, I think it is entirely possible that shot quality could be a factor when one team is playing against a single opponent over the course of a playoff series.

I thought to look at the high/low CBS numbers for Montreal's series against both Pittsburgh and Washington to see what they tell us. If Montreal's skaters are legitimately doing something to impact the other team's shots, then we would expect to see their opponents have a higher percentage of low shots than the Habs. If this is a bunch of talking head garbage, then the percentages are going to be similar for both teams and Montreal was just lucking out.

What do the data tell us?

Montreal vs. Pittsburgh:

High shots: Pittsburgh 45, Montreal 45
Low shots: Pittsburgh 180, Montreal 128

Montreal vs. Washington:

High shots: Washington 73, Montreal 62
Low shots: Washington 216, Montreal 131

Wow. I'd say that at least warrants a closer look.

It's important to note that we have to be careful with this data. It still seems like whoever tracks this stuff sometimes just falls asleep for a period here and an entire game there. For example, in game one of the Pittsburgh series just 2 out of 55 shots were recorded as being high, and in game three against Washington just 3 of 77 shots were marked down as high shots. Several other games were suspect (games 6 and 7 against Washington, games 3 and 5 against Pittsburgh), all of whom had a total of 8 high shots or fewer for both teams.

I'm inclined to throw those games out, and rerun the results.

Montreal vs. Pittsburgh (G2, G4, G6, G7 only):

High shots: Pittsburgh 37, Montreal 39
Low shots: Pittsburgh 116, Montreal 53

Montreal vs. Washington (G1, G2, G3, G5 only):

High shots: Washington 60, Montreal 56
Low shots: Washington 98, Montreal 61

Montreal won 6 out of these 8 games, so these games may not be exactly representative of the two series. However, it is a good sample to try to figure out whether the Habs' defensive tactics were effective. This evidence certainly suggests that they might have been, assuming that this data is good. Whether it was because they had more pressure on the puck, or because they were clogging the shooting lanes, or because they had more counterattack opportunities or odd-man rushes, these numbers are evidence that Montreal's shots may have been of higher quality than those of their opposition, particularly against the Penguins.

Even if that was true, that of course does not mean there was no luck involved. The Habs have benefitted from a healthy dose of good fortune, especially against the Caps. Today's goalies are very good at taking away the bottom of the net, but low shots aren't by any means harmless, especially ones taken close to the net. Think of Halak's pad save on Evgeni Malkin in the third period of game 7, for example. The Habs have survived a bunch of similar chances in the playoffs.

Montreal is not likely to sustain either their shooting percentage or save percentage numbers so far (13.7% on high shots and 10.5% on low shots in the second sample, compared to 9.3% and 6.1% respectively for their opponents). I'd say they should still be the underdog in the Eastern Conference Finals against whoever wins tonight. Yet maybe there is at least something to Jacques Martin's madness after all.

The Age of Goalie Parity

2010-05-12T18:00:00.000-04:00

Here are the post-lockout playoff win/loss records of the top 10 goalies in post-lockout regular season save percentage (minimum 200 regular season games played):

Tomas Vokoun: 1-4
Niklas Backstrom: 3-8
Henrik Lundqvist: 14-16
Tim Thomas: 10-8
Martin Brodeur: 15-22
Roberto Luongo: 17-17
Ryan Miller: 22-18
Ilya Bryzgalov: 12-9
Cristobal Huet: 6-11
Miikka Kiprusoff: 9-16

Combined record: 109-129

That's pretty remarkable, the teams with the top-performing goalies on them have been more likely to lose than to win in the playoffs. And that list certainly makes one wonder why Roberto Luongo seems to take more heat for his playoff team success than the rest of the guys combined, even though only three of them have better win/loss records than he does.

As we all know, factors other than goalie skill contribute heavily to determining the winner, but it's also true that the top performers in a population with a small standard deviation in skill (like NHL goalies) will not have much of an advantage over a relatively small sample size of games (like the NHL playoffs). It's quite possible that the worse goalie outperforms the better goalie in a playoff series, and indeed we've seen it happen several times these playoffs. After all, a difference of .005 in save percentage is just 1 goal every 200 shots, which is a typical number of shots a goalie might face in a seven game series. Niemi outplaying Luongo or Boucher outplaying Brodeur is going to happen a lot more often than most people think.

In today's NHL offence wins championships and pretty much all the goalies in the playoffs are decent. The best goaltenders have not been winning championships and it's not going to happen this year either. Sometimes it really is better to be lucky than to be good.

Why Underdogs Teams Are So Gritty

2010-05-11T15:00:00.001-04:00

I've thought for a long time that many hockey observers are far too quick to invoke effort as a major reason for the results of a particular hockey game. A lot of the time I don't think there is too much behind it at all, it just becomes a post hoc explanation for why one team's shots went in and the other team's shots did not. It turns out there could be an additional factor influencing this as well, a bias against the favoured team. Here's a quote from an interesting Slate article about why we love underdogs:

"Why is an underdog so attractive? It may have something do with how hard he tries. Vandello showed subjects a video clip of a basketball game between two international teams said to be playing for a championship. One side was described as the 9-to-1 favorite, having won each of 15 previous playoff matches. After viewing the footage, which showed a close game, students were asked to rate the players according to their ability and effort.

As a rule, the underdogs were characterized as having less "talent" and "intelligence" than the favorites but more "hustle" and "heart." That was true even when subjects viewed the same video clip with the labels reversed. It didn't matter what was actually on the screen—which players jumped higher or who dived for the loose balls. The test subjects attributed more effort to whichever team had the underdog label."

I'm sure these results would be no different in hockey, and often explains why teams like the Colorado Avalanche are considered a plucky, gritty, group of warriors while teams like the San Jose Sharks are often described as lazy bunch of wimps. The problem is that the evidence from the games they played against each other showed San Jose heavily outshoting Colorado. When the underdog that is supposedly trying to so hard and giving it their all can't even get the puck away from a team that is allegedly made up entirely of soft players that don't even care, it either indicates the first team is really, really terrible or that the subjective observation is wrong.

It's possible that an underdog team actually does outwork a favourite, but we need to be careful to ensure that it was not just a convenient narrative but something that actually happened. If you are going to insult the professionalism of a group of players, coaches and managers by implying they don't care about winning or that they weren't prepared to play, you need a lot more evidence to support your point than the fact that the goalie on the other team made a lot of saves.

(P.S. What do you think the results would be if a similar video study was done on a group of Canadian hockey fans, where the viewers were told that one team was Russian and the other team was Canadian? Something tells me that would have a pretty significant impact on which team was showing more "hustle".)

Can You Learn How to Be a Winner?

2010-05-04T18:00:00.002-04:00

Once upon a time, there was a goalie in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League who was a highly-touted prospect. He played 35 games as a 16 year old and then attracted a lot of attention with a great year as a 17 year old. He was named the best defensive player in the Q and his team won two playoff rounds before losing in the semifinals. At the end of the season, the goalie's name was the first one called out in the NHL entry draft. Everything looked very promising indeed.

Then this is what happened to him in big games (playoffs and international hockey) over the next 5 seasons:

18 years old: 0-4, 4.47, .904 in a first round loss, plays fairly well at the world juniors but loses in the gold medal game

19 years old: 1-3, 3.31, .886 in a first round loss to a #7 seeded team, let in 6 goals on 30 shots in brief taste of AHL playoffs, scores the game winning goal on himself while stopping 24 of 28 shots in a loss in the gold medal final at the world juniors

20 years old: 0-2, 4.37, .843 in the AHL playoffs, loses starting job to Andy Chiodo

21 years old: 2-3, 3.47, .883 in the AHL playoffs, loses starting job to Dany Sabourin

22 years old: 1-4, 3.76, .880 in first taste of NHL playoff action

That's nothing short of awful, right there. Surely this guy would never be able to accomplish anything in big games, right? Let's continue:

23 years old: .933 save percentage as his team goes to the Stanley Cup Final

24 years old: Stanley Cup champion

I'm sure you have already recognized the goalie as Marc-Andre Fleury. I don't know of any other elite goalie prospect with a worse pre-NHL playoff career than Fleury. People often like to criticize goalies by saying that they have "never won anything"; Fleury not only didn't win anything, but he pretty much actively helped lose everything that he was involved in. Yet today he is considered by many to be one of the game's best pressure performers. I can recall in particular a few exceedingly dumb columns written by sportswriters arguing that Fleury's amazing clutch abilities should have made him the starter for Team Canada over Roberto Luongo in the medal round after the U.S.A. loss, even though their arguments boiled down to little more than "1 Cup > 0 Cups".

If one was to argue that Marc-Andre Fleury is clutch, then it would seem to be difficult to also claim that past clutch performance is a great predictor of future results. This is a sample of one, I recognize that, but the extreme nature of the results at both ends would still be pretty unlikely if goalies are truly consistent in pressure situations. The only way around this would seem to be to claim that everything that takes place before the NHL doesn't count at all, or to claim that something changed with Fleury as he got older, he "learned how to win" or something like that. The natural follow-up question to that would be that if Fleury was able to so easily escape his past failures, what's to stop any other goalie from deciding to do the same? Again, that would not reflect particularly well on the value of using past playoff successes to predict future ones.

No doubt some clever sportswriter could craft some eloquent narrative about how Fleury learned to "play within himself" and realized that "he didn't have to make all the saves, just the important saves", or possibly that he was "mentored by a veteran backup/goalie coach/teammate who taught him the mindset of a champion." I think he just had Crosby and Malkin on his team. We'll see if the Pens can make a third straight run to the Finals, the door appears to be wide open for them and so far they are 5-2 despite Fleury's .889. No doubt that would lead to a lot more veneration of this "modern-day Grant Fuhr".

Special Teams Variance

2010-05-01T11:00:00.002-04:00

In the playoffs you never know how a team or a goalie is going to perform on special teams. Call it a streak, a slump, luck, randomness, variance, or whatever you want, guys run hot and cold and just because you're going one way in one series or even one game doesn't mean it will carry into the next.

Ask Jaroslav Halak. After stopping 50 out of 50 shots taken by the Washington Capitals' power play, the league's #1 ranked unit during the regular season, Halak made just 1 save on 5 shots while shorthanded against the Pittsburgh Penguins in game one of their Eastern Conference semifinal.

The range of even strength save percentages among goalies who have played in at least 4 games these playoffs is .878 to .967. If we drop off the outlier on the top end (Brian Boucher's .967) and the bottom end (Brian Elliott's .878), the range is just .894 to .944, which is not very far at all off of the range of results during the regular season (.896 to .937, counting only goalies who played in at least half of their team's games).

Contrast that with the results on the penalty kill so far. They range from Elliott's awful .667 to Halak's aforementioned 1.000. Halak wasn't even the only guy who has been flawless so far on the PK (Tuukka Rask stopped all 23 shots he faced while his team was down a man), and the next guy up from Elliott was Roberto Luongo at just .730. That means you can drop the top and bottom and still get a range of .270. The regular season range was .853 to .919.

We would expect more variance on the penalty kill just because of the sample size, but we should probably also expect an additional spread in results because of the team factors. Since all a team's games come against the same opponent in each round, a good PK unit up against a weak opposing power play should make life much easier on its goalie, and vice versa. Strength of opposition should therefore be more variable than it is during the regular season where the games are spread around against all levels of opposition, albeit with some divisional effects in play.

At even strength goalies face more shots, and they are likely to face shots from a larger group of players, given that teams will run 3 or 4 lines consistently at even strength and then shorten the bench on special teams. This probably helps reduce the randomness.

It's hard to rate goalies based on special teams play. Was Halak unbeatable in round one because he was terrific, or because the Habs power play was doing such a great job of coverage, or because the Washington shooters were just a bit off? Probably elements of all three. Similarly, did Roberto Luongo play poorly on the PK in round one, or was it more a case of his teammates being mediocre and the Kings playing great? Or is it all just one big roulette wheel of puck luck?

The point is that nobody knows what we will see in the next round. Don't bet on the hot hand, because he might already have gone cold, and if you have a skill guy who is shooting blanks (Alex Semin comes immediately to mind) then keep running him out there because pretty soon the tide is going to turn. The trick is for the team to stay alive in the interim, something that Semin's teammates weren't able to do. Only good teams win the Stanley Cup, but they still need to get some bounces and breaks along the way.

Winning By Getting Outshot

2010-04-28T11:30:00.003-04:00

In 2009-10, including the playoffs, the Montreal Canadiens are 9-1-0 when allowing 46 or more shots against. The same team is just 3-14-2 when allowing between 26 and 30 shots against.

That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, especially given that the team's goal support numbers are not that far apart (2.86 goals per 60 minutes for 46+ SA games, 2.53 goals per 60 minutes for 26-30 SA games). The difference looks to be because the Habs (and their opponents) tend to adjust their play to the score. When Montreal beats better teams, especially in games where they take the lead early, they usually allow a lot of shots against. When Montreal loses, especially in games where they fall behind early, they tend to allow an average level of shots against.

Here are the period-by-period shooting percentage, save percentage and shots for/shots against numbers for Montreal in both 26-30 and 46+ shot games this season:

26-30 Shots Against:
First period: 6.0%, .881, 215 SF, 185 SA
Second period: 8.5%, .889, 216 SF, 201 SA
Third period: 4.8%, .924, 210 SF, 179 SA

46+ Shots Against:
First period: 18.6%, .957, 70 SF, 163 SA
Second period: 8.2%, .975, 85 SF, 158 SA
Third period: 7.4%, .947, 81 SF, 150 SA

I know En Attendant Les Nordiques has scoring chances for Montreal this season. I really wish my French was better because what I do understand of his analysis is always very interesting. I'd like to see how much the Habs' scoring chances are affected by the game score, and just how much the chance-to-shot ratio varies depending on whether they are leading or trailing. The percentages above make it look like the leading team, either Montreal or their opponent, managed with some success to reduce scoring chances for both teams in the third period.

His numbers from game 6, though, suggest that Montreal was not able to reduce shot quality very much in the late going. In the last two periods Washington outshot Montreal 36-12 and outchanced them 25-8. Jaroslav Halak had to make a ton of tough saves to keep his team in front. It should be noted that the Caps are a great team that would probably outplay Montreal anyway, which it makes it tough to tell how much of that chance differential was the impact of their tactics and how much of it was because of a difference in ability.

If Montreal gets up early tonight we can expect an avalanche of chances from the Caps, and they're going to need Halak to hold the fort again. If Washington goes out in front, they'll probably play a bit more defensively and be a bit more selective with their shots. As a result, if Halak makes 45+ saves tonight it will most likely be in a Habs win or overtime loss. If Washington's final shot total ends up in the 26-30 range, that's probably not going to be good news for Montreal.

Synergy

2010-04-23T00:35:00.003-04:00

Scott Stevens in the playoffs without Martin Brodeur:
42 wins, 51 losses

Martin Brodeur in the playoffs without Scott Stevens:
16 wins, 26 losses

Scott Stevens and Martin Brodeur in the playoffs together:
83 wins, 56 losses

Apart, neither has won a game beyond the second round. Together they have 3 Stanley Cup rings. Just in case anybody needed a reminder that teams win in the playoffs, not individuals.

And no, I'm not criticizing Brodeur. He wasn't the reason New Jersey lost this year, just like Scott Stevens wasn't the reason that Washington never won anything in the 1980s. I feel like I could write the same post I did last summer, where I argued that Brodeur has been the same guy in the playoffs whether the Devils were winning or losing, the difference was the play of the team in front of him. When your team scores eight goals in five games on Brian Boucher, then you're very probably going to lose.

Rookies vs. Veterans

2010-04-15T18:00:00.000-04:00

Day one of the playoffs is in the books, and the big stories were upsets and playoff rookies doing well. Playoff newcomer Brian Elliott outplayed defending Champ Marc-Andre Fleury while Craig Anderson also won in his first taste of NHL playoff action.

Experience usually gets a lot of play in the media and around the barstools at this time of year. From a goalie perspective, there is a noticeable lack of experience among most of the playoff teams this year. Seven goalies will be making their playoff debuts, while another has just one start to his name and yet another has just one start in the last 10 years. Here are the career playoff games played prior to last night of the 16 expected playoff starters:

1. Martin Brodeur, 176
2. Evgeni Nabokov, 65
3. Jose Theodore, 49
3. Marc-Andre Fleury, 49
5. Ryan Miller, 34
6. Roberto Luongo, 22
7. Brian Boucher, 22
8. Ilya Bryzgalov, 16
9. Jaroslav Halak, 3
10. Pekka Rinne, 0
10. Jimmy Howard, 0
10. Jon Quick, 0
10. Craig Anderson, 0
10. Antti Niemi, 0
10. Tuukka Rask, 0
10. Brian Elliott, 0

Does that mean that New Jersey, San Jose or Pittsburgh are the most likely teams to win the Cup? Not in my book. There has not been much of a relationship between goalie experience and playoff performance, suggesting that experience is largely overrated as a factor in postseason success.

Since the lockout, here are the numbers for goalies in their first playoff season compared to the numbers for goalies who had prior playoff experience (goalies with less than 120 minutes of prior experience were still counted as rookies):

Veterans: 244-230, 2.46, .914
Rookies: 92-106, 2.58, .913

The save percentages for the two groups were essentially identical. It is even closer than the rounding makes it appear. The rookies were at .9134 while the veterans were at .9136, a difference of .0002 over a total sample size for both groups combined of over 20,000 shots. Assuming that differential represents the true skill difference from having been there before, experience would seem to account for one additional goal saved every 24 playoff series. That's one goal every 6 playoff seasons if the goalie's team went to the Finals in each and every one of them.

The rookies faced an extra 1.4 shots against per game, which accounts for the difference in GAA and likely much of the difference in win/loss record. It seems unlikely that the goaltenders in either group would have had an effect on the shots against, since the sample is made up of a diverse group of athletes and the goalies who made their playoff debuts between 2006 and 2008 appear in both samples. The most probable explanation is that the best teams in this period tended to have playoff veterans. This is supported by the fact that although several goalies had great performances in their first playoff seasons, the only one to make it to the Finals was Cam Ward in 2006.

Last night the rookies combined for a .902 save percentage while the veterans combined for .910. The main reason for the veterans' slight outperformance was Brian Boucher, a guy who played a total of two minutes in the playoffs from 2003 to 2009. Three of the five most experienced playoff goalies were in action last night, and those veterans combined for a dreadful .871 save percentage.

When a rookie goalie gets shelled, people usually make up stories about how he lacked experience and couldn't handle the pressure. When a veteran goalie who has won before plays poorly, it usually gets attributed to other factors (fatigue, the team in front of them, old age, etc.). The excessive focus by many on playoff experience appears to mostly be caused by confirmation bias. People only remember the data points that fit the sample. If you look at the entire sample in recent years, there is essentially nothing at all to suggest that a playoff newcomer will perform worse than a grizzled veteran.

Calling a goalie a playoff rookie in the first place is often a very NHL-centric view, especially with an ever-increasing crop of Europeans coming over to play goal in North America. Most of the netminders with zeroes beside their names above have extensive playoff experience in Europe, the AHL or international competition. The only two starters with essentially no playoff experience as a professional are Elliott and Quick, and they both played in the NCAA Championship.

If you want to predict playoff goalie performance, I don't think you'll lose much accuracy at all by focusing on a goalie's talent and regular season track record and ignoring the variable of experience.

Theodore

2010-04-12T17:00:00.001-04:00

Is playing net for the 2009-10 Washington Capitals somewhat like playing for the mid-'80s Edmonton Oilers? Relative to league average scoring, this year's Caps are surprisingly competitive with Gretzky & co. Washington's average of 3.83 goals per game is 38% better than league average. The only edition of the dynasty Oilers to top that mark was 1983-84, when the team scored a record 446 goals and was 41% better than league average.

Jose Theodore has attracted some attention lately because of he has not lost a game in regulation over his last 24 games played (20-0-3). In one of those games Theodore was pulled after 3 early goals, and only escaped because his teammates game up with 3 late markers to pin the loss on replacement Semyon Varlamov. Even if we count that game, 1 regulation loss in 24 games remains a most impressive team record. I'm interested, as always, in how much of this record is because of the goalie and how much is because of the team.

If you look at the list of games, there are certainly some where the team bailed out their goalie. Theodore gave up the first goal about half the time in his starts, so he wasn't holding off the opposition early. The Caps had games where they trailed 5-3 in the second period, 4-1 in the second period, 5-2 in the third period, 3-0 in the third period, and 3-1 in the second period, and in every case they came back to either win or at least force overtime. Obviously the prolific offence had a big part to play in those big comebacks, which are still very unlikely in general in today's NHL.

On the other hand, Theodore's distribution of save percentage by period is pretty interesting over this streak.

First Period: 238/261, .912
Second Period: 218/243, .897
Third Period: 207/214, .967

For the most part, the Caps did not completely dominate their opponents for 60 minutes. Of all the third periods that Theodore played, the Caps only started with the lead in seven of them. They were trailing six times, and tied nine times. Without getting that high rate of saves from their goalie late in the games, the Caps probably wouldn't have won as many. On the other hand, it's at least possible that there were some playing to the score effects in there. The shots against drop as the game goes on, it could be that the team was focused on their personal counting stats in the early part of the game and around the 40 minute mark started to turn their attentions towards bringing home the "W".

I'm not sure whether this year's Caps are getting a bit lucky based on the percentages or whether they are collectively doing something to make them shoot/stop the puck at a higher rate than expected. Generally in those types of questions you can almost always assume that it's luck, but when you have such an extreme outlier as Washington is it makes you at least wonder.

I think Theodore has probably been running hot in a few key game situations. He's definitely contributed to the streak, but there have been more than a few times when the snipers in front of him did all the heavy lifting. I also think he got a bit lucky in terms of the goal distribution, winning quite a few games by 4-3 or 5-4 scorelines. Some in the media seem to not respect Washington because of their goaltending situation. I wouldn't write them off entirely because of that, but we should expect Theodore's playoff performance to be much closer to his career average of .908 than the .922 he has during his latest unbeaten streak.

Just as a bit of trivia, in his 2001-02 Hart Trophy season Theodore had a stretch where he had a .933 save percentage and 2.18 GAA yet was just 11-11-6.

P.S. Sorry about the silence around these parts lately, hope to be back on a more regular posting schedule as we head into the playoffs.

The One Stat Argument

2010-03-22T14:00:00.000-04:00

From time to time I get feedback that I focus too much on save percentage. The main criticism is usually that it is folly to rely on only one stat, and that a well-rounded analysis should take all the available numbers into account (e.g. GAA, wins, shutouts, games played, etc.).

The one stat criticism sounds pretty reasonable. It seems intuitive that adding more information is a good thing. It is also undeniably true that save percentage does not tell us everything. It is important to know how many shots the goalie faced to be able to assess the level of randomness in his results. We should also take into account how many of those shots came on the penalty kill, and whether there is evidence of any other team factors like shot quality effects. It also seems clear that goalies have some small impact on shots against, and that should be taken into account.

What is usually suggested in place of a save percentage analysis is to take all the different stats, apply a weighting to each of them, and then calculate the final rankings based on all the different inputs. The problem with this approach is that it simply doesn't deliver on its promise. It does not actually measure a lot of different things that a goalie does. What it does is count save percentage 4 or 5 times, and then add in a bunch of irrelevant team factors. This is because every commonly available goalie stat is essentially a different way of restating save percentage and shots against.

Let's go down the list. GAA, as I've pointed out many times, is equal to (1 - save percentage) x shots against per game. It's handy as a shortcut to compare goalies on the same team, but if you're looking at rivals it's much better to try to make sense of the two underlying components than to try to assess their combination.

Shutouts are very obviously driven by a combination of save percentage and shots against, only we are adding in an arbitrary cutoff (why is 0 goals against worth so much more than 1 goal against when teams win 90% of the time when they allow a single goal?) and a healthy dose of small number randomness (shutouts are infrequent, which means luck is often the difference between something like an ordinary 5 shutout season and a great 8 shutout season).

Wins are determined by goals for and goals against. The goalie has almost nothing at all to do with goals for, and goals against are determined by the same two familiar factors of save percentage and shots against.

Goalie's World magazine has a fairly typical "computer ranking" that puts a weighting on each of the traditional goalie stats. On the surface, it looks like it is measuring a lot of different things. However, break down all the stats into their components and it is essentially only tracking three things: Save percentage, shots against per game, and how good the rest of the team is at scoring goals.

Given that only one of those three variables is mainly determined by the goalie, it makes a lot of sense to me to focus on save percentage. That doesn't mean raw save percentage is a perfect stat, because it is not. Step #2 is to make any necessary corrections (e.g. shot quality, special teams adjustments, shot bias) or try to incorporate any other results (e.g. shot prevention). What does the goalie do to win games other than stop pucks? If we know what those things are, then we should focus on them directly.

Maybe a goalie helps his team with his puckhandling and prevents a shot against per game. Preventing one shot is the same as preventing about 0.1 goals, which based on a typical game with around 6 total goals is about 1.7% of the total team contribution. How are we going to see that small effect show up in the overall win total? We might not see it all through the noise of how good the team is at territorial play, how good they are at shooting, how disciplined they are at taking penalties, how good they are at faceoffs, how good their coach is at matching lines, injury luck, shootout performance, etc. However, if I increase the goalie's shots against totals by the estimated amount of shots he prevented, he will get credit for them and that will boost his save percentage.

One other commonly cited justification for relying on wins is that certain goalies help their teams win by performing better in important situations. The problem is that most of the time we can predict quite accurately what the standings will be based on goal differential. According to Alan Ryder, goal differential explains 94% of wins. This suggests that any "clutch win" effect is likely to be either small or influenced by luck.

Maybe over the course of a season a team wins 2 more games than expected based on their goals scored and allowed. Even in the unlikely event that this is entirely because of the clutch skill of the starting goaltender, that's going to be a net result in a similar range as shot prevention (about 0.1 goals per game, based on the standard goal differential that is usually required to produce 2 extra wins). This again would make up a percentage point or two of the total team effort, and just like the shot prevention effect is likely to be hidden from sight among the hundreds of player interactions, coaching decisions and random bounces that determine the outcome of a hockey game.

For goalies that we suspect have an additional effect on team play, I think we are better off determining the effect and using that to adjust the save percentage numbers. It is of course tricky to estimate things like shot prevention, but it is much more tricky and uncertain to try to somehow estimate a goalie's shot prevention effect directly from his GAA. Or to assess the contribution of a goalie based on his career wins number. Both of those are complete guesswork, and far worse alternatives than some of the methods already proposed for dealing with some of the unknowns (e.g. comparing to backup goalies, or estimating the effect by combining our subjective evaluation with our knowledge of general performance ranges for a particular skill).

I focus heavily on save percentage not because save percentage is perfect and tells us absolutely everything, but because I think the other stats just don't bring an awful lot to the table. They are merely different ways of telling you how good a goalie was at stopping the puck and how good his team was at preventing shots.

Shaking off the Rust?

2010-03-11T16:39:00.004-05:00

Heading into the Olympics, the league average save percentage in the NHL this season was .912. That put the league on pace for the highest average save percentage since 1970, higher even than the average during the pre-lockout period with its clutching and grabbing and huge goalie equipment. I'd say that's more evidence that the goalies today are better than ever, and that goalie equipment is not as big of a factor as many make it out to be.

Yet even though it has been 11 days since the closing ceremonies, I think some of the goalies in the league must still think they are on vacation. Goalscoring has been up significantly since the NHL resumed, with an average of about 6 goals per game in the 63 games since Crosby's OT winner. The netminders have not been making the stops of late, combining for an average save percentage of a mere .899.

It's possible that the goalies are rusty from having not played for two weeks. It could also theoretically be possible that the jam-packed Olympic year schedule may be having some effect, but as mentioned they were doing pretty well in December, January and February and most of the league's starters should have been able to rest up while they watched the Olympics on TV.

Much gets made about goalie fatigue and whether certain teams are playing some goalies too much. I'm still not exactly sure of the size of the real fatigue effect, but I suspect it is likely not as significant as generally assumed. To me, it seems like going a long time without playing might very well be more likely to result in poor performance than regularly playing every second or third day. I'm reminded of this post from a while back that showed that October was on average the worst month for goalies. It could be that we tend to show too much concern for starting goalies and their perceived heavy workload, and don't properly appreciate the backups who have to stay sharp despite sometimes going weeks without facing shots in game situations.

On the other hand, even some of the goalies who did play in Vancouver are doing poorly, headlined perhaps by gold medalists Roberto Luongo and Martin Brodeur and their matching .869 save percentages in March. Perhaps there is no underlying cause, and this is just a brief, random streak in the long NHL season where offence comes to the fore at the expense of goaltending.

For All the Wrong Reasons

2010-03-01T23:00:00.003-05:00

My brother said to me yesterday, "If Canada wins, everyone will think Luongo is a great goalie...for all the wrong reasons."

Sure enough, there are lots of articles out there today about how Roberto Luongo has overcome his demons and gone from choker to clutch in the last six days. Take this one from NHL.com, for example, that is titled "Luongo now has proof that he's among the game's elite."

What was this proof? Was it the fact that Luongo has the highest save percentage of any goalie in the league with 250+ games played since he broke in as a rookie in 1999-00? Is it that he appears headed towards his ninth consecutive year with an even strength save percentage of .925 or better? Perhaps it was 51 career shutouts, despite playing most of his career in the high shots against environment of New York and Florida? Or being named as one of the top 2 goalies for the best hockey-playing country in the world in the last four best-on-best international tournaments? Maybe the journalist was convinced by Mike Babcock, who pointed out last week that Luongo's bank account shows he is one of the highest-paid goalies in the league?

Nope. It was that the highest-scoring team in the NHL era of the Olympics won the gold medal with Luongo in net. It's amazing how one game can have such a big effect on opinion, either for the good (gold medal win) or the bad (game 6 vs. Chicago).

I did think that Luongo coped very well with the intense pressure of a country that expected and demanded the gold medal. He kept saying how much fun he was having, and clearly relished the moment. He also managed to steer clear of the pitfall that caught other top goalies like Martin Brodeur, Miikka Kiprusoff, Evgeni Nabokov and Henrik Lundqvist, that one poor game that helped sink their team's chances of victory. But I don't think Luongo was really a difference-maker during the Olympics, at least not in the same way Ryan Miller and at times Jonas Hiller were.

Luongo's performance in Vancouver was actually pretty reminiscent of Martin Brodeur's play in 2002. Sorry for being the hundredth person to bring you that completely unoriginal thought, but that doesn't make it any less true. They both began as the team's #2 option, they both never really stood on their heads for any particular game, they both received attention for a big save in a 3-2 game (Luongo on Demitra, Brodeur on Brett Hull), and they both might have saved their best game of the tournament until last, where they gave up two goals in the gold medal game against the United States.

The tournament stats definitely share a resemblance:

Brodeur, 2002: 4-0-1, 1.80, .917
Luongo, 2010: 5-0-0, 1.76, .927

For my money, Patrick Roy still owns the best Olympic performance by a Canadian NHL goalie. Despite that, St. Patrick came home without any medal at all. Goaltending can have a big impact in a short tournament, but there is a very good reason why 20 other players also get to bring home the gold.

I'm interested to see if Luongo picks up the same post-Olympic gold medal "bounce" in public perception and award voting that Martin Brodeur did in 2002. No doubt there will still be a small element out there that will keep doubting the Vancouver goalie until his team achieves some more NHL postseason success, but this year's Canucks squad is probably the best team he has ever played on. Luongo has a special opportunity this season to completely change the way the average hockey fan thinks about him. Even if it is for all the wrong reasons.

Why Does Experience Matter, Again?

2010-02-22T11:03:00.007-05:00

Does anyone have any evidence that experience helps goalies in playoff games and/or international tournaments? Anyone? I don't think I've ever seen anything that backs up that oft-used coaches' sentiment/broadcaster cliche. Olympic veterans Martin Brodeur and Evgeni Nabokov have been shaky, while Olympic rookies like Jonas Hiller and Ryan Miller have been great. In recent playoffs, a lot of young guys have done well and a lot of veterans haven't. I think talent should be the only deciding factor in picking a goalie.

When you focus on experience, you just end up being biased for one player over another based on them having played more games, and what it ends up being is tyranny of the status quo. I'm reminded of Canada coach Mike Babcock's comments prior to the Olympics. He said about his goaltenders, "I don't think it's a big secret that nobody was really on fire coming into the tournament for us." In hindsight I should have known right then and there that he was planning to go with Brodeur as his starter, because that's a ridiculous statement. The pre-tournament play between the goalies wasn't even close, it was Luongo by far. Luongo got pulled in his last start against Minnesota, in a game where his team was completely dominated. Somehow that supposedly defined him as stumbling into the Olympics, even though he was 8-2-0, 2.22, .926 in his previous 11 starts, the last five in a row played on the road. In his last 10 starts in the rink where the Olympics are being held, Luongo was 8-1-1, 1.89, .937.

Martin Brodeur was also pulled in his last pre-Olympic tuneup, the difference is that in his prior 11 he was just 4-5-2, 2.78, .884. If you're not even going to give Luongo the title of the hottest goalie heading into the Olympics, then you're already committed to the veteran incumbent no matter how much you talk about evaluating the play of both goalies.

I'm going to assume that Luongo's in net for the rest of the Olympics after Brodeur cost Team Canada the game against the U.S.A. But who knows, if you want to ignore puckstopping talent and recent form and dwell on past glories there's no doubt you can make the case for throwing Brodeur back in net against Germany. Some people are already making it in the media, led by Brodeur's biggest fan and autobiography co-author Damien Cox. But if Brodeur's puckhandling is a negative, as it was last night, then I don't see any justification to play him over Luongo at all. Brodeur's non-save skills are what makes it close between them in the first place, because the track record makes it abundantly clear that Luongo is the better puckstopper.

I still see goalie puckhandling is one of the most overrated skills in hockey. Every good play has a small positive value and every bad play has a huge negative value. At the end of the day I just don't see much of a difference being made. Having said that, of course Brodeur had a bad night with the puck yesterday. On a good day he can definitely help the team. To do that, though, he needs to play under a lot more control. If Brodeur thinks the team is better with him swinging wildly at the puck out of midair rather than having the best defenceman in the NHL this season (Duncan Keith) pick up the puck out of the corner, then he's really overrating his own ability.

I'm still not convinced Team Canada will actually change their netminder, because I think they probably already decided at some point that Brodeur was going to be their guy throughout the tournament and didn't expect to be in this situation. Hopefully they make their choice based on merit, not based on experience. Rating goalies based on one game is a terrible idea, and Brodeur has a decent chance of rebounding if he was to get the call for further games. However, if you want to run an organization that rewards good play and not just seniority then you simply have to hand over the reins when one guy drops the ball that badly. Especially when your backup goalie is likely as good as or better than your starter to begin with.

Steve Mason a Potential Olympian?

2010-02-12T13:19:00.003-05:00

I have to say I was a fan of the selections for the Canadian Olympic hockey team, but I'm not inspired with confidence after seeing Steve Mason named as the injury replacement on call ahead of other options like Cam Ward or Carey Price.

Ward and Price have both had their ups and downs, but at least they've had some ups. Mason's been flat-lining ever since the magic December 2008 that made him famous. His monthly save percentages in 2009 and 2010 are decidedly unimpressive:

.904
.901
.914
.883
.881
.902
.898
.875

Yikes. I get that he's the "goalie of the future" and has a world junior gold medal pedigree, but right now he shouldn't be anywhere near the Olympics. I'm assuming that it would have been Ward if not for injury, and that Mason was more or less the default option as the only remaining healthy goalie who attended the orientation camp last fall, but if Patrice Bergeron could make the team then there was no reason they couldn't go outside the training camp roster for their selections.

Who the fourth goalie is will have no effect on the games, of course, but it still reflects on the selection process. If they get that wrong, they might very well get it wrong on who will be the #1 or the #2. The correct answer to both of those questions, of course, is "Not Marc-Andre Fleury." Just compare them over last season and this one:

Roberto Luongo: .672 win %, 2.31 GAA, .920 Sv%
Martin Brodeur: .640 win %, 2.33 GAA, .916 Sv%
Marc-Andre Fleury: .640 win %, 2.66 GAA, .910 Sv%

Luongo vs. Brodeur is a fun debate, but realistically that choice probably won't have much of an effect on Canada's win probability over a short tournament. Just keep Fleury in the stands and it should be OK.

I did notice, however, that if you watch the documentary "On Home Ice" (available on Youtube), there is a shot of a whiteboard with the Canadian depth chart on it while Team Canada's management staff was discussing player choices. The goalies are listed in the following order:

Fleury
Brodeur
Luongo

I don't know if that means anything, but I sure hope not. I guess we'll find out in four days.

Kari Lehtonen Is a Star

2010-02-10T08:00:00.000-05:00

This blog has long been a fan of Kari Lehtonen, who was dealt yesterday to the Dallas Stars for a prospect and a 4th round pick. I've made the case for Lehtonen in a couple of places, but the basic argument is that between his stints on the IR he has put together some pretty persuasive evidence of being a terrific puckstopper.

Even Strength Save Percentage Leaders Since the Lockout (min. 200 GP):

1. Tomas Vokoun: 282 GP, .935
2. Roberto Luongo: 328 GP, .930
3. Tim Thomas: 250 GP, .927
3. J.S. Giguere: 243 GP, .927
5. Miikka Kiprusoff: 353 GP, .926
5. Martin Brodeur: 314 GP, .926
7. Henrik Lundqvist: 316 GP, .925
7. Kari Lehtonen: 200 GP, .925
9. Ilya Bryzgalov: 238 GP, .924
9. Ryan Miller: 296 GP, .924

That is some heady company for Lehtonen to be keeping. However, it's not all positive for the young Finn. There are certainly question marks. The injuries, of course. Consistent rumours out of Atlanta questioning Lehtonen's motivation, conditioning and commitment. PK save % numbers that are nothing special and well below the rest of the above group. His shots against, which have been consistently higher than his playing partners, implying that his skill in terms of goal prevention may be slightly lower than his save percentage implies.

Dallas gave up one of their better prospects, which may indicate they have some long-term plans for Lehtonen. Changes of scenery can often be beneficial for athletes with elite potential but questionable work ethic. With Alex Auld and Marty Turco still in the mix in Dallas, Lehtonen will have to work hard to be able to play.

It's impossible to predict whether Lehtonen's injury woes are in the past or something that will continue to plague him throughout his NHL career. Nevertheless, if I was Dallas I'd probably rather bet my team's playoff chances on Lehtonen than on the apparently washed-up Marty Turco. It will be interesting to see how Lehtonen does in Dallas. I think he has a good chance of success.

I'll also be staying tuned to see the shots against numbers for Lehtonen as a Star, especially compared to Turco. We'll see what the gap is between a guy who has a track record of facing more shots than his teammates and one of the top puckhandlers in the league. That figure could shed more light on the boundaries of shot effects for NHL goalies.

The Hogwash of "Big Saves"

2010-02-02T19:00:00.003-05:00

Let's do a thought experiment where we imagine a goalie who is perfect and has the ability to stop every single shot he faces. That's because he is so athletic, or so big, or because he can read shooters' minds, or however else you want to imagine the hypothetical. His skills have only one limitation, they don't apply in shootouts because shootouts have nothing to do with the rest of the game of hockey. This goalie's skill is average in shootouts and as a result his team has the same 50% chance of winning a shootout as anybody else.

The goalie also happens to be an attention seeker and a thrill junkie, who loves pressure situations. He doesn't care at all about personal stats, only whether his team wins the game or not. His team is in a non-traditional hockey market and is struggling to sell tickets. As a result, the owner wants to have every game be as exciting as possible to boost the gate receipts.

The owner has discussed strategy with the goalie, and they have agreed that the goalie will adjust his effort to try to make every game as close as possible, but at the same time never intentionally throwing a game. They decide it is also best not to tell the team's coach of this plan, since the owner is thinking of firing him at the end of the season and doesn't want the media or the league to find out that his team is in effect shaving points.

Since he doesn't know he has a goalie with super powers, the coach does not use any all-out offensive strategies that might make sense in such a scenario (aggressive forechecking, playing with four or five forwards, using cherry-pickers, etc.). Instead he plays a typical offensive system, and the team is about average offensively.

What does the goalie do in this scenario? Obviously he can freely give up goals when his team is ahead by 2 goals or more, because he can then shut the door and preserve the one goal margin. What about if his team is leading by a single goal? If there is little time left in the game, then it is unlikely that his team will score again. A shootout brings a 50% chance of losing, so if the goalie intentionally gives up a goal late in the game when ahead by one there is an even money chance that he is costing his team a win. Earlier in the game it is more likely that the goalie's team will score again to retake the lead, but nothing is guaranteed since hockey is a low-scoring game.

If he wants his team to pick up two points in every game, the goalie can't risk giving up any lead at all. There are some situations where the gambling odds might be pretty favourable, such as playing at home against a weak opponent where his team goes up 1-0 early in the first period. But give up enough goals in those scenarios and eventually there will be a game that will remain tied and be lost in a shootout.

By similar logic, the goalie can't give up a goal when the game is tied. In fact, that is considerably more crucial than allowing a goal when his team is ahead. A tie game is at least guaranteed to earn a loser point from going to a shootout, but if the team is trailing they need a goal just to force a shootout and face the prospect of a regulation loss if they aren't able to score again.

So this goalie, even if he is really daring, will probably never allow the first goal against and will most often just wait until his team scores 2 or 3 goals before he starts letting some in. He might for fun let in a goal or two early in the game against a bad team, or let the other team tie it up at 1-1 or 2-2 early in the game if he's pretty sure his teammates can score again. Despite giving up as many goals as he can he'll still probably lead the league in GAA and have a very high save percentage.

Now let's revise the scenario to make it a little more realistic. Some goals in hockey are just unstoppable by any goalie because they come on deflections, screens, lucky bounces, great setups, or shots that are simply too fast and too perfectly placed for anyone to stop. Let's assume that on average there is one goal against per game the goalie can't do anything about. These goals occur randomly and without any regularity. Sometimes the goalie goes several games in a row without allowing any, and sometimes he lets in 2 or 3 of them in the same game. How does that change his strategy, given his objective of not trying when his team is very likely to win yet still winning every game possible?

The answer is that now the goalie will essentially have to try to stop everything unless his team is up by 2 goals or more. Even if they are ahead by 2, he could end up blowing the lead by messing around and giving up a goal for fun which is then followed immediately by another one on an unlucky bounce. Similarly, he wouldn't want to intentionally let the other team tie the game because there is always the chance they will then take the lead on an unstoppable shot.

If his team scores 0, 1 or 2 goals in the game (which happens 47% of the time on average) the goalie will likely try to stop every shot he faces. If the team scores 3 or 4 goals (which happens 38% of the time on average), the goalie might let in one or two intentionally. About 14% of the time the team will score 5+ goals, and in that case the goalie can let in some goals for fun.

Multiply out the probabilities of the team's goal support with the expected intentional goals the goalie might allow, and the average would be about one intentional goal against per game. So if a goalie was trying to win every game while simultaneously never trying to stop the puck when he didn't have to, his goals against would be about one goal higher than it would otherwise be. That is, a save percentage of close to .000 when it doesn't matter would equal a GAA increase of about one.

I think it's pretty clear that under any even remotely realistic assumptions about how much a goalie is going to be goofing off when his team has the game in hand that the GAA effect is going to be very minimal, unless the goalie is playing on some kind of dynasty that is always blowing out the opposition. And even then it's certainly no positive trait in my book that a goalie doesn't care whether or not he gets scored on, even if his team is well in front.

It remains possible that there may be slight differences in team performance because of differences in goalie success in high-leverage situations. But I'm not convinced that is either significant or based on repeatable skill. If it exists it will create a slight difference between goalies with similar performance levels, but there is simply no way that a goalie like Marc-Andre Fleury (.907 career save percentage) is doing more to help his team win than a Tomas Vokoun (.917), regardless of career win/loss records.

I think the basic problem behind this common misconception is that people consistently overestimate the level of control a goalie has over his own play and the number of goals against. Vic Ferrari writes constantly about how hockey is a game of luck, and that's really true. Yet fans have heard lots of stuff about how goaltending is such a mental game, so they think that a goalie in the proper mental state can just decide to make himself unbeatable. Either that or or they give too much credence to one of those overplayed stories where Patrick Roy or somebody stood up in the dressing room and said, "Get me one more goal, boys, because I'm not letting in another one." He probably said that almost every time they were tied after two periods in the playoffs, and needless to say his team did not always win the game.

Sometimes the shooters make their shots, that's a fundamental basic truth of goaltending. It's not always the goalie's fault that the puck hits the back of the net. Anyone who wants to be a goalie or who wants to properly evaluate goaltending needs to be aware of that simple fact, or you're evaluating the luck-soaked result instead of the skill-based process.

If there exist some goals that are unstoppable and a goalie can't predict his team's future offence, which are two basic assumptions that obviously hold in hockey, there really is very little opportunity for a goalie to mess with the scoreline without costing his team. And that is why attempts to explain away poor individual save statistics with references to a goalie's win total are just biased nonsense.

Long story short, the next time you hear an announcer say something like, "It's not how many saves you make, it's when you make them", what he's actually telling you is, "I have no idea how to separate the contribution of a goalie from the contribution of the rest of the team."

Shots Against

2010-01-28T19:00:00.000-05:00

This is just a short post on a little idea I had a while back and have been meaning to get around to doing. It's on the topic of the relationship between save percentage and shots against. One way to put a team in the best possible context is to look at other teams in the league that are similar. For example, if it is easier to play goalie on a team that allows a lot of shots against then it is likely that other teams with a similar shot profile would have the same advantage.

I looked at the situational save percentage numbers for the five teams that were closest in shots against per 60 minutes to the New Jersey Devils and the Florida Panthers from 2003-04 to 2008-09. New Jersey and Florida are two teams that are often brought up when various theories are advanced about whether the number of shots per game a goalie faces has an effect on their save percentage. I also reran the numbers using a few possible shot bias/goalie shot effect adjustments (adding one shot and two shots to New Jersey's totals and subtracting one from Florida's).

The result? There doesn't seem to be any significant effects from different levels of shots. If either of the teams are outliers then they also stand out against teams with similar shot prevention.

League average: .918 EV SV%, .866 PK SV%, .912 PP SV%

Team	Adjustment	EV SV%	PK SV%	PP SV%
New Jersey	0	.918	.868	.906
New Jersey	+1	.916	.865	.918
New Jersey	+2	.919	.865	.915
Florida	0	.916	.867	.913
Florida	-1	.916	.865	.911

Three Stars

2010-01-26T17:30:00.000-05:00

I bash the media a lot in this space, but sometimes it is interesting to see what they have to say. For Puck Prospectus I put together a look at three star selections for goalies.

I just quickly looked up the same numbers last year for Steve Mason, because I'm interested by how seasonal statistics like GAA and shutouts can have a huge impact on perceptions. Fans and media personnel who watch the games can be unimpressed by a goaltender night after night over long stretches of the season, but come April the number of wins and shutouts in the goalie's stat line might lead them to quite a different conclusion. If you watch a goalie make 18 easy saves against the Carolina Hurricanes on a Tuesday night in November, you might think that was a pretty meaningless shutout. Months later, when your memories of that game have faded and you are trying to decide which goalies to put on your Vezina ballot, that shutout might make the difference between that goalie or someone else.

Mason's three star voting numbers in 2008-09 fell right in line with his save percentages. He was lights-out in December (.950 save %, named one of the game's three stars 8 times in 11 starts), but was mediocre for the rest of the season (.905 save %, named a game star in just 10 out of 41 starts). Over the entire season Mason was named a star of the game in 34% of his starts, which is pretty good but not anything unusual since the average for goalies is about 30% of the time.

For three and half months Mason's play was subpar and those watching certainly weren't being amazed by what they saw. Yet because of his terrific work earlier in the year, every time they looked at a stat sheet they saw a pretty low GAA, a decent win total and most notably a lot of shutouts. The result was a widespread perception that Mason carried the Blue Jackets into the playoffs, earning him a flat-out ridiculous 4th place finish in Hart Trophy voting.

High and Low Shot Games

2010-01-22T09:00:00.000-05:00

I looked at low shot games in one of my Puck Prospectus articles from earlier this year, and I wanted to look at those games in a bit more detail. I took a sample of this season's games with the most and the least shots taken by one of the teams. For the most shots, I took the 40 highest totals, while for the least shots I took the top 38 (to avoid ties that would have extended the sample well past 40).

Here are some of the numbers:

Shooting Percentage by Period:

1st period: High Shot 4.3%, Low Shot 14.6%
2nd period: High Shot 5.8%, Low Shot 8.7%
3rd period: High Shot 7.6%, Low Shot 10.4%

These numbers really show how a team's shooting percentage (or, conversely, the opposing goalie's save percentage) impacts the number of shots in the game. A high save percentage tends to cause higher shots against, while a lower save percentage tends to cause lower shots against.

I did not remove empty net goals. If I had done so, I'd guess that both the high and low shot teams would have had third period numbers that were more similar to their second period results.

The low shot teams shot the lights out in the first period, and then probably scored at about the the league average rate for the next two periods (excluding likely empty-netters). This indicates fairly strongly that the direction of causation runs from the percentages to the totals, rather than the other way around. The high shot teams scored at a below-average rate throughout the game, suggesting that very high shots against numbers do tend to go hand in hand with a high save percentage (although it could still be that an outstanding goalie performance is usually required for a team to take that many shots).

If the game score had a strong effect on the numbers, then that should show up in a breakdown of shots against by period:

Percentage of Shots by Period:

1st period: High Shot 31.6%, Low Shot 32.6%
2nd period: High Shot 32.7%, Low Shot 38.4%
3rd period: High Shot 32.5%, Low Shot 27.4%
Overtime: High Shot 3.2%, Low Shot 1.6%

The third period is when we would expect to see the strongest playing to the score effects. The third period is when the least shots were taken in low shot games. This again supports the theory that low shot games are usually a result of the scoreline and the percentages early in the game.

In contrast teams with high shot totals did not show any playing to the score effect, at least on the offensive side.

I also thought to look at the shots broken down by game situation, to see whether power play or shorthanded situations might have had a significant impact.

Shooting Percentage by Game Situation:

5 on 5: High Shot 5.1%, Low Shot 10.6%
5 on 4: High Shot 7.2%, Low Shot 12.8%
4 on 4: High Shot 7.8%, Low Shot 10.0%
4 on 5: High Shot 7.7%, Low Shot 16.7%

Percentage of Shots by Game Situation:

5 on 5: High Shot 73.1%, Low Shot 76.2%
5 on 4: High Shot 19.0%, Low Shot 14.9%
4 on 4: High Shot 4.1%, Low Shot 4.8%
4 on 5: High Shot 2.1%, Low Shot 2.9%

The low shot teams had a higher shooting percentage at all four game situations. In my view this supports the theory that shooting percentage has a strong impact on shots against. I suspect there may be some shot quality effect at even strength related to shots against. For example, the team that is taking more shots will likely be also taking more from the less dangerous scoring areas, and more of their shots will come from third/fourth liners and defencemen. However, it seems unlikely to me that a goalie would perform worse while shorthanded or on the power play simply because of a low overall number of shots against in the game.

I had a theory that one of the reasons that goalies often put up low save percentages when not facing very many shots was that they faced a higher percentage of power play shots. It turns out that the exact opposite was true, at least in 2009-10. One of the reasons that those teams took few shots in the first place was that they did not tend to have very many power play opportunities. The high shot teams had a situational distribution that is very similar to the overall average.

It seems apparent that save percentage has an impact on shots against. Teams that posted high shot totals tended to have very low shooting percentages early in the game, while the opposite is true for teams with low shot totals. There does appear to be some relationship between high shots against and a higher save percentage, although it is still somewhat uncertain how much that has to do with a potential shot quality effect and how much the shots against are caused by the high save percentage.

A very high shots against total tends to come in games where one team is significantly better than the other and where the better team has some incentive to keep playing for 60 minutes (i.e. the score is close or the team being outshot has the lead). That is usually only possible when the goalie on the weaker team is having a good day. After all, if the better team gets 3 or 4 goals and builds a comfortable lead then they usually shut it down somewhat and don't end up hitting the 40+ shot range.

It may be possible that goalies on weak teams get more chances to pad their stats with 40+ shots against games where a lot of the shots are of relatively low quality. It is possible that this counterbalances the likelihood that bad teams would tend to give up higher numbers of scoring chances against. I think more analysis needs to be done to determine whether there is an overall effect. All studies I've seen that look at seasonal averages for all teams show no relationship between save percentage and shots against, so I don't doubt that for most teams it all comes out even in the wash, but it remains to be seen whether there are unusual effects on outlying teams such as the Panthers or the Devils.

Shutouts and Shots Against

2010-01-21T07:30:00.002-05:00

Martin Brodeur is the all-time shutout leader in professional hockey, having surpassed both Terry Sawchuk's NHL record and George Hainsworth's professional record earlier this season. With his blanking of Florida last night Brodeur now sits at 108 for his career.

Holding the opposition off the scoresheet 108 times (and counting) is a terrific achievement. The vast, vast majority of hockey goalies who have ever played the game would not have achieved that mark even if placed in exactly the same situation with exactly the same opportunities, and most of them would likely not have come close.

However, it possible that there are a few who would have not only come close, but perhaps even surpassed Brodeur's mark. We'll never know for sure, because everyone is affected by situational factors and it's impossible to completely simulate any "what-if" scenario, but as with any record or achievement it is important to properly establish the context.

Shutouts depend on two variables: The quality of a goalie, and the quality of the team's defensive play. Defensive play can be split into two sections, the quantity of shots against and the quality of shots against. Evaluating shot quality is still a bit of a tricky issue but shot quantity is a simple matter of record, with the small caveat that there is good reason to believe that the counts are not completely consistent from rink to rink.

The goalie reference site HockeyGoalies.org has game-by-game breakdowns for every NHL goalie from 1985-86 to 2008-09. I chose to look at the period from 1993-94 to 2008-09, which encompasses essentially the entire career of Martin Brodeur. I chose for my sample all the goalies who rank on the current top 10 list for active leaders in career games played or career shutouts. To that group I added Hasek, Roy, Belfour, Joseph and Kolzig to make up a sample of 17 top-class netminders.

I looked at every game in which any of the goalies played at least 56 minutes and got the decision (win, loss, tie, or OT/SO loss). Here is a chart of the shutout frequency for the group. On the X-axis is the average number of shots per period, rounded off to the nearest one (e.g. 8 shots against per period means 23-25 shots against per game). The reason for grouping the shots in this manner was to increase the sample size for each data point on the chart. On the Y-axis is the percentages of games that ended in a shutout. The relationship between shots against and shutouts is very obvious. Facing fewer shots against helps a goalie record significantly more shutouts.

Having established that, we can move on to the individual breakdowns. Let's begin with my favourite comparison, Dominik Hasek vs. Martin Brodeur. Here are the number of times that each of them has faced a specific number of shots per period, and how many shutouts they have recorded in those chances.

2 shots/pd: Hasek 0/0, Brodeur 0/0
3 shots/pd: Hasek 0/1, Brodeur 1/2
4 shots/pd: Hasek 2/4, Brodeur 1/9
5 shots/pd: Hasek 5/19, Brodeur 7/37
6 shots/pd: Hasek 5/46, Brodeur 12/92
7 shots/pd: Hasek 13/69, Brodeur 19/156
8 shots/pd: Hasek 13/84, Brodeur 18/192
9 shots/pd: Hasek 7/85, Brodeur 23/171
10 shots/pd: Hasek 13/113, Brodeur 8/112
11 shots/pd: Hasek 12/89, Brodeur 5/72
12 shots/pd: Hasek 7/67, Brodeur 5/49
13 shots/pd: Hasek 2/30, Brodeur 2/30
14 shots/pd: Hasek 1/16, Brodeur 0/9
15 shots/pd: Hasek 0/10, Brodeur 0/2
16 shots/pd: Hasek 0/3, Brodeur 0/2
17 shots/pd: Hasek 0/3, Brodeur 0/0
18 shots/pd: Hasek 0/0, Brodeur 0/0
19 shots/pd: Hasek 0/1, Brodeur 0/0

On a percentage basis, Hasek has the better shutout percentage at 7 different shot levels while Brodeur has the edge 4 times. What is more noticeable is that the two goalies faced very different shot distributions. Brodeur's curve is centered around 8 while Hasek's chart peaks at 10. By multiplying the probabilities we can estimate that a typical goalie in the sample would be expected to record 53 shutouts facing Hasek's shots and 88 shutouts facing Brodeur's. That means on a relative basis Hasek was 51% better than the rest of the group compared to 15% for Brodeur.

The difference is further revealed when we take Hasek's rates and apply them to Brodeur's games, and vice versa. Hasek with Brodeur's shots against would be expected to record a whopping 125 shutouts. Brodeur with Hasek's shots against would be expected to end up with just 60.

To be fair to Brodeur, it isn't usually flattering to any goalie to be compared against the Dominator. Furthermore, there is some evidence that Brodeur prevents shots and that his home rink may have been a bit cheap in recording shots against. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt, and shift his rates by 1 shot/period (i.e. crediting him for 3 extra shots against per game). I'd say that's very probably overstating the effect, but I'll be conservative. That lowers the expected shutout numbers to 76, meaning that Brodeur outperforms by 33%. That's a solid mark, but still short of Hasek.

To make up the full difference, we would have to assume that Hasek was the opposite of Brodeur, that he creates an extra shot against per period. There is nothing at all to suggest an effect anywhere close to that large, but if Hasek's rates are shifted by 1 shot/period in the opposite direction we get the following:

Hasek: 80 shutouts, 62 expected, +29%
Brodeur: 101 shutouts, 76 expected, +33%

Even with an edge of up to six shots per game, Brodeur barely beats out Hasek. That's not taking into account the number of power play shots against and the quality of the defences in front of each goalie. Brodeur is the all-time shutout leader, but I think it's fair to say that there was at least one guy who was still clearly better at shutting out the other team.

Sample size is a potential issue with this analysis. For example, Roberto Luongo only had 3 games where he faced an average of 5 shots against per period or less, and he did not record a shutout in any of them. However that is far too few games to tell whether Luongo has any unusual performance patterns against that level of shots against.

It may be better to raise the sample size by consolidating the shot levels even further. The average shutout frequencies created some natural pairings, since as it turns out 6/7, 8/9, 10/11, and 12/13 all have shutout percentages within 1% of each other. I'll also include 4/5 as a grouping, since shutouts occurred 21% of the time with 4 shots per period and 17% of the time with 5. I excluded everything below 4 or above 13 because those events were so infrequent and therefore likely not useful for predictions. Here are the shutout results compared to expected for all the goalies in the sample, for that particular shot range only, ranked in order of performance above average:

Hasek: 79 SO, 51 exp, +55%
Luongo: 45 SO, 32 exp, +41%
Nabokov: 48 SO, 39 exp, +23%
Brodeur: 100 SO, 88 exp, +14%
Lalime: 35 SO, 32 exp, +9%
Roy: 46 SO, 43 exp, +7%
Belfour: 62 SO, 59 exp, +5%
Giguere: 32 SO, 31 exp, +3%
Kiprusoff: 30 SO, 29 exp, +3%
Turco: 36 SO, 38 exp, -5%
Vokoun: 29 SO, 32 exp, -9%
Joseph: 47 SO, 54 exp, -13%
Osgood: 48 SO, 57 exp, -16%
Khabibulin: 38 SO, 47 exp, -19%
Theodore: 27 SO, 34 exp, -21%
Roloson: 23 SO, 31 exp, -26%
Kolzig: 35 SO, 51 exp, -31%

"Average" as defined here really represents something well north of the true league average, since the only guys in this sample are top-flight goalies. That just makes Hasek and Luongo's numbers even more impressive. Factor in shot prevention and/or scorer bias and goalies like Belfour and Brodeur move up a bit as well. It's possible Brodeur should be in third place instead of Nabokov, all things considered. I think it's fair to say that Brodeur has demonstrated a very good shutout ability, and part of the reason that he doesn't have as many high-shot shutouts as other goalies is that his teammates were much less likely to give up that many shots against.

That's not too bad of a list in terms of the order, but it does seem that there are some team effects behind the numbers. Some teams are probably more likely to create easy shutouts for their goalies. Compare, say, Patrick Lalime's numbers against Curtis Joseph's. In any event, this reinforces earlier work I've done on this topic that show Hasek and Luongo were terrific at recording shutouts. Keep in mind however that while shutouts contain some information they are still a bit of an arbitrary stat. There is certainly a lot more to goaltending than shutouts.

Puck Prospectus: The Best Goalie in 2009

2010-01-08T19:30:00.000-05:00

Here's a link to my Puck Prospectus article on the best goalie in the calendar year of 2009. Spoiler alert: It's the guy I said wasn't worth his contract in this post from the summer of 2008. Whoops. Actually, in my defence, I said that he had to improve on his play to be able to justify his paycheque, which I think was probably a true statement at the time, and Miller certainly appears to have done that over the last 12 months.

I just wanted to throw in a few comments about the Sabres and shot quality here, since they are relevant to Miller's performance. The debate continues over the significance of shot quality measures and as such I think it's a topic that is worth investigating. I'd say that the immediate post-lockout Sabres are one of the most interesting case studies for shot quality analysis, because there seems to be a discrepancy between what one would intuitively expect and what the shot quality metrics claim. The shot data says the Sabres have tended to allow easier than average shots against, but with the offensive style that Buffalo played up until this season I think the general perception was that Miller was often being hung out to dry.

I wonder if a higher percentage of shots and goals against came on the rush for the Sabres in those seasons. The team was certainly shooting the lights out themselves, which indicates that they were creating some pretty good chances, and several of their players reached scoring levels that they hadn't reached before and haven't matched since. That suggests some kind of team effect, and it seems reasonable to me that a high-event team would see the percentages go up at both ends of the ice, just like a conservative low-event team would likely make the job easier for their own goalie in exchange for creating less offence at the good end of the rink.

I also suspect that Buffalo didn't play much to the score defensively, especially at home, and kept pushing for goals. From 2005-06 to 2007-08, the Sabres scored 3.67 goals per game at home and allowed 2.84 against. On the road, they scored 3.04 and allowed 2.89. That's a 21% scoring jump at home with almost an identical defensive record. Compare that to an average team, which scores 11% more at home and allows 11% fewer goals against. In 2006-07 the Sabres won the President's Trophy while allowing the fourth-most third period goals against of any team in the league. To put that into context, the last two President's Trophy winners both allowed the fewest third period goals against in the league. At the same time, the Sabres were also shooting the lights out late in the game, as from 2005-06 to 2007-08, Buffalo's lowest rank in third period goals scored was 4th.

This year Buffalo is tied for third in fewest goals against in the third period. Buffalo's third period goal distribution (+41/-29) is in fact identical to that of the New Jersey Devils. Without knowing the shot totals it is tough to say how much the goaltending has to do with that, but that's quite uncharacteristic for post-lockout Buffalo. Over the past three seasons the most similar team to the Sabres in third period scoring has been the Carolina Hurricanes, not exactly a team that anyone would confuse with the Devils. The Sabres are also 17-0-0 when leading after two periods in 2009-10, which is quite an improvement given that closing out games is something that the team has been pretty mediocre at over the last three seasons.

Perhaps there is a shot quality effect that isn't being accounted for in terms of rush chances. Time and space affects shot quality, both in terms of allowing the shooter to make a better shot as well as giving him more available options for the defensive team and goalie to worry about and try to defend against. We know that power play shots are more likely to go in than even strength shots from the exact same spot on the ice. That is likely because the shooter has more time and space to make their shot, and that the power play team can use quick puck movement to create a more difficult scoring chance for the goalie. Those same factors are why odd-man rushes are also dangerous scoring chances.

It wouldn't be possible to identify every rush chance from the play-by-play records, but I wonder if goalies see their save percentages drop if they face a shot against within, say, 8 seconds of a shot at the other end of the rink (adjusted for scoring location, of course)?

I'd say that the statistical evidence suggests that Miller has improved his game lately from where he was a few seasons ago. He looks better to my eye this year as well. It remains possible that there were some team factors that exaggerated his apparent recent jump from good to great. I would welcome the input of any Sabres fans if they have any additional insights on the post-lockout Sabres' play, shot quality, and its possible impact on Ryan Miller.

Olympic Goaltending

2010-01-04T23:30:00.000-05:00

The provisional Olympic rosters have been announced, and here are the goaltenders for each country (listed in alphabetical order):

Canada: Martin Brodeur, Marc-Andre Fleury, Roberto Luongo
Russia: Ilya Bryzgalov, Evgeni Nabokov, Semyon Varlamov
Sweden: Jonas Gustavsson, Stefan Liv, Henrik Lundqvist
United States: Ryan Miller, Jon Quick, Tim Thomas
Finland: Niklas Backstrom, Miikka Kiprusoff, Antero Niittymaki
Czech Republic: Ondrej Pavelec, Jakub Stepanek, Tomas Vokoun
Slovakia: Peter Budaj, Jaroslav Halak, Rostislav Stana
Switzerland: Martin Gerber, Jonas Hiller, Tobias Stephan
Germany: Dennis Endras, Thomas Greiss, Dimitri Patzold
Norway: Pål Grotnes, Andre Lysenstøen, Ruben Smith
Latvia: Edgars Masalskis, Ervins Mustukovs, Sergejs Naumovs
Belarus: Vitali Koval, Maxim Malyutin, Andrei Mezin

No real surprises among any of the top countries, at least among the guys who are actually going to be on the ice in Vancouver. Canada's top three picks were pretty obvious. Finland had some options with the top-level goalies they have available (e.g. Pekka Rinne, Tuukka Rask), but going with a tandem of Kiprusoff/Backstrom wasn't too surprising. Sweden could have picked one of their other experienced NHL goalies as their #2 or #3, someone like Johan Hedberg, but I expect Lundqvist will play nearly every game and certainly every game of consequence. Similarly it could be argued that Craig Anderson has been better than Jon Quick, but it really doesn't matter to anyone other than those two guys since the Americans' #3 goalie will be stuck behind last year's Vezina winner and this year's Vezina frontrunner.

Assuming Halak and Hiller get the majority of the starts for Slovakia and Switzerland, all of the top 8 countries have above-average NHL puckstoppers. I looked at the save percentages for the expected starters or starting tandems over the last three seasons plus this one so far (save percentages are adjusted for game situation, using factors of 80% for EV SV% and 20% for PK SV%):

1. Jonas Hiller, SUI .921
2. Niklas Backstrom, FIN .921
3. Roberto Luongo, CAN .921
4. Tomas Vokoun, CZE .920
5. Martin Brodeur, CAN .920
6. Tim Thomas, USA .919
7. Henrik Lundqvist, SWE .917
8. Jaroslav Halak, SVK .917
9. Evgeni Nabokov, RUS .914
10. Ryan Miller, USA .914
11. Miikka Kiprusoff, FIN .913
12. Ilya Bryzgalov, RUS .913

However, the bottom four goalies on that list have all been very good so far this year. In fact, if we rank the same goalies by their performance this year, we get an almost inverted list:

1. Ryan Miller, USA .932
2. Evgeni Nabokov, RUS .928
3. Ilya Bryzgalov, RUS .928
4. Miikka Kiprusoff, FIN .928
5. Jaroslav Halak, SVK .924
6. Henrik Lundqvist, SWE .921
7. Tomas Vokoun, CZE .921
8. Roberto Luongo, CAN .919
9. Tim Thomas, USA .917
10. Martin Brodeur, CAN .917
11. Jonas Hiller, SUI .914
12. Niklas Backstrom, FIN .910

Combining both metrics by taking the average of the two, to get a mix of a goalie's track record and their current level of play, we see how close the goaltending probably is (numbers are for the highest-ranked goalie only from each country):

1. USA .923
2. Russia .921
3. Czech Republic .921
4. Slovakia .921
5. Finland .921
6. Canada .920
7. Sweden .919
8. Switzerland .918

I don't necessarily agree with that exact order, I'm especially skeptical as to whether the Russian goalies can maintain their hot starts, but I think the general point is fairly clear that none of the top countries can expect to have much of a goaltending edge in Vancouver. The U.S. team might have a slight advantage if Ryan Miller can maintain his outstanding play so far this season, but over a short tournament that's still probably an expected difference of a goal or two saved compared to everyone else. Hockey games are usually decided by the skaters anyway, but that should be even more true at these Olympics where everyone has a more than capable backstop. It is certainly possible that some goalies will get hot or cold and end up deciding a key game in February, but at the moment it's little more than a guess as to which goalies that might be, if any. To borrow a quote from the movie The Incredibles: "When everyone's super, no one will be."

(Just a little postscript for Canadian fans, Marc-Andre Fleury's numbers are .911 over the past 3+ seasons and .903 this year. He may impress the type of crowd that ranks goalies entirely based on playoff wins and team success, but I certainly hope Canada doesn't entertain any thoughts of actually putting Fleury into a game.)