An interesting article at the fivethirtyeight blog brought up an interesting point: A lot of goaltending is luck.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/...better-goalie/
For anyone who followed the 2012 American Election, they may remember Nate Silver who used statistics to pick every winner in virtually every race. In his fivethirtyeight blog, him and his team use statistical analysis to determine interesting things in sports as well.
What they found with regards to goaltending was really interesting to me. A Hot Goalie is the most important thing to have playoff success. Yet, a goalie with great regular season stats is not a good predictor of playoff season success. A "good" goalie's skill is only partly responsible for his difference from normal, the rest is luck.
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But herein lies a great paradox: Despite goaltending’s outsize impact on the outcomes of hockey games, it’s extremely hard to say exactly which goalies are truly good or bad at their jobs.
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The poor correlation of save percentage from one year to the next also indicates that goalies are extremely volatile commodities. For instance, if a goaltender is above average in a given season, there’s only a 59.2 percent chance he’ll be above average again the following year. And if he’s below average now, don’t worry: There’s a 47.2 percent probability that he’ll be above average next season.7
Take Brian Elliott of the St. Louis Blues. During the 2010-11 season, Elliott was the NHL’s second-worst qualified goalie — only Nikolai Khabibulin was less effective at stopping pucks — and in 142 career games he had a lifetime GA%- of 111 (which translates to 11 percent worse than league average). If any goalie seemed unlikely to play well in the future, it was Elliott, but the very next year he led the NHL with a 69 GA%- (31 percent better than league average), at the time the third-best single-season performance by any goalie since the NHL started tracking save percentage in 1984.8 And how did Elliott follow that brilliant campaign? By posting a below-average 106 GA%- last season, and a 90 GA%- this year.
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This does not mean that there is no difference in talent among goalies. It just means there’s a great deal of uncertainty around how any one goalie compares to another, and that the distribution of talent among NHL-caliber goaltenders is significantly more narrow than would be expected from looking at season-level save percentages alone.9 As a consequence, the “replacement-level” save percentage for goalies (to borrow a term from baseball’s sabermetrics, referring to the production a team could expect from a minimum-salary player freely available on the waiver wire) is remarkably close to league average.10 This, too, is a product of the uncertainty surrounding the true talent level of any given goalie — with such high levels of volatility, teams don’t need to accept bad goaltending performances for long. Given what little information we have about any goalie’s actual talent, a backup is almost as likely to give above-replacement production as a struggling starter is.
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I think this is why we aren't seeing teams throw as much money at goalies anymore. The deviation between skill levels of goalies just isn't that big anymore. When looking at Calgary's future, this finding also supposes that we shouldn't waste an early pick on a goaltender.