Five thirty eight Blog: "A Hot Goalie Isn't a Better Goalie"

[Street Pharmacist]

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.

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.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.

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.

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.

[ComixZone]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

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.

I don't think we're seeing that at all. List is below, I listed multiple goalies for teams that don't have a defined #1.

Playoff teams this year:
Sharks:
Niemi - 3.8M

Red Wings:
Howard - 5.3M

Bruins:
Rask - 7.0M

Pens:
Fleury - 5.0M

Blackhawks:
Crawford - 2.7M, goes up to 6M next year

Kings:
Quick - 5.8M

Habs:
Price - 6.5M

Blues:
Miller - 6.25M

Rangers:
Lundqvist - 6.9M, goes up to 8.5M next year

Ducks:
Hiller - 4.5M
Anderson - 925K, up to 1.2M next year

Stars:
Lehtonen - 5.9M

Avs:
Varlamov - 2.8M, goes up to 5.9M next year

Minnesota:
Backstrom - 3.4M
Bryz - 2.2M
Harding - 1.9M

Tampa:
Bishop - 2.3M
Lindback - 1.8M

Flyers:
Emery - 1.5M
Mason - 1.5M, goes up to 4.1M next year

The vast majority of the good teams still spend a significant amount of money on #1 goalies, and goaltending in general.

It doesn't matter if the deviation between goaltenders is narrow - it exists, and it translates to wins. It's why teams pay for it. Good goalies are paid on par with good forwards and defenders, and elite goalies are paid on par with elite forwards and defenders.

[Street Pharmacist]

Maybe it just feels that way with how the FA goalie market has been

[Sylvanfan]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

Maybe it just feels that way with how the FA goalie market has been

The thing is that not many true starters make it to the UFA market. Anti Niemi got a big arbitration award which made him a UFA late one summer due to the Blackhawks cap situation. The Flyers did throw a lot of money at Bryzgalov only to end up buying him out. So really we usually only see backups on the UFA market. Most starters who are worth keeping get re-signed by the teams they are with, largely due to the lack of starting jobs available. Even Miller I suspect will never hit the UFA market as he will stay with the Blues.

[Caged Great]

The thing is that there's more middle tier goalies now than before.

There's been 5-10 really awesome goalies at any given time, pretty much from the Roy era forward (Belfour, Cujo Brodeur, Roy etc). The difference is that even the bottom tier goalies are decent. There aren't too many Rick Tabbaracci calibre starters in the league any more. Just really bottom of the barrel guys.

Because of that, a lot of goalies are interchangeable. See Bryzgalov and Scrivens in Edmonton. Each had good stats when in LA/Min, but became garbage when in EDM. Similarly, even Chad Johnson is doing awesome in Boston. I think even Dubnyk would look like a decent goalie if he was in Boston.

If you don't have one of the elite, it's all varying degrees of meh.

[driveway]

Originally Posted by Caged Great

The thing is that there's more middle tier goalies now than before.

The difference is that even the bottom tier goalies are decent. There aren't too many Rick Tabbaracci calibre starters in the league any more. Just really bottom of the barrel guys.

...

If you don't have one of the elite, it's all varying degrees of meh.

I don't think this is true. I did a quick check of the GSAA (Goals-saved Above League Average) stat at hockey-reference.com, I feel like it shows there are a similar number of good and terrible goalies now as there were in the past.

Now, this is just a back-of-the-envelope thing and I'm not a statistician by any stretch. All I did was count the number of goalies who had a GSAA of better than +15 and -15 for each season. I picked 15 as the number pretty much arbitrarily, so maybe choosing a higher or lower cut-off point would give a different assessment, but I could see really no pattern at all, just noise.

The blue line is goalies above-average, the red line is below average.