[Street Pharmacist]

Because the goalie is a team’s last line of defense, it’s no surprise that strong performance in net is incredibly important to winning a hockey game. During the regular season, save percentage (the generally accepted shorthand measure of goaltending effectiveness) explains a higher proportion of team performance than any other fundamental factor in hockey.#In the playoffs, the emphasis on goaltending only intensifies; save percentage is easily the most important determinant of a team’s goals-per-game differential in the postseason. A hot goalie really is the key to a successful playoff run.

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.

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.

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. 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.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/...better-goalie/

This is a good summary of my thoughts. Any goalie can get hot. A goalie over the long term is more likely to put up career numbers than a goalie like Hammond is to put up the numbers he did last year. Every year, a few goalies go on horrible streaks and a few go on hot streaks.

Unfortunately, goalies have an outsized impact on your season and you have to commit to one. You can't play without one. So you answer this question: How do you pick the one that will give you the best chance when there's very little correlation from one season to the next?

First off, you minimize your goalie's negative effect by minimizing shots against. Flames are middle of the pack here only because they block so many. That's a bit misleading though because if you're blocking the farther away shots it likely means that those left are from closer (my thoughts, no proof). They allow the third most shots attempts, so it seems to me the flames then are at a bigger risk of the downside from bad goaltending.

The second thing is to pick for a goalie with a good amount of work behind him. A goalie is more likely to perform to his career numbers than his previous season or last 20 games. I know some will argue that Hiller is an example where this is a terrible idea, but a) he's clearly "post apex" and regressed, and b) there's far more examples where it works.

Having said that, I'm fine with Ortio as a back up. You need to start somewhere finding a goalie that will be consistently good. I guess I just don't see it happening from a goalie who hasn't put up impressive numbers yet with any consistency. If the flames want to win next year, Ortio as anything more than back up would be a very large gamble.