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Quote:
Originally Posted by Textcritic
So, where is your data? You claim that goalies can plough through +70 games without missing a beat. Who are all these goalies, and how successful have they been in the Stanley Cup playoffs over the past decade?
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Never mind the Stanley Cup winner portion of your argument. Most goalies don’t win the Cup.
Here is some data. If fatigue was an issue, presumably towards the end of a 70-75 start season, goalie stats would falter.
http://brodeurisafraud.blogspot.com/...tigue.html?m=1
Quote:
The justification for the importance placed on games played seems to be that it is more difficult to play more games. I remain unconvinced that playing additional games is significantly more difficult. I think that virtually every goalie in the NHL is capable of handling the workload. If they weren't, then they would have failed on some lower level (junior, college, minor-league) when they were asked to play 70-75 games a season.
But what do the numbers say about it? Yahoo Sports provides breakdowns of month-by-month stats, so I thought it would be interesting to see if goalies tired as the season went on, which is what would be expected if fatigue is an issue. To ensure that I had a full selection of statistics and that era issues wouldn't come into play, I chose a group of goalies that have played a lot of minutes in recent years and that began their careers relatively recently (e.g. late '90s or later).
Here is the list of goalies in the sample: Roberto Luongo, J.S. Giguere, Marty Turco, Tomas Vokoun, Evgeni Nabokov, Miikka Kiprusoff, Jose Theodore, Nikolai Khabibulin, Rick DiPietro, Marc Denis, Ryan Miller, and Henrik Lundqvist.
I broke down their statistics by month to see what the results were (minutes, win %, GAA, save %, shutouts):
October: 543 GP, 2.71, .905, .497 win %, 28 SO
November: 730 GP, 2.53, .912, .531 win %, 53 SO
December: 774 GP, 2.48, .914, .547 win %, 54 SO
January: 768 GP, 2.58, .910, .521 win %, 53 SO
February: 653 GP, 2.56, .912, .535 win %, 53 SO
March: 817 GP, 2.53, .913, .539 win %, 53 SO
April: 242 GP, 2.52, .913, .566 win %, 14 SO
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You can see that there is no discernible dropoff in performance over the course of a season.
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