Well if you ask my co-host of the TWO GUYS & HOCKEY TALK ‘Live Show’, he will tell you just that. Ask many players who have played the game of hockey and they will very likely say the same thing. It’s a term used for ‘you never know what you’re getting’ . One day they’re hot and the next day ‘not’?
If you think about it, even at the highest levels of Hockey in the NHL and KHL, how many Goalies are able to perform at that pro level? For example in the NHL, there is only 32 NHL teams and each team has 1 back up. Of those 64, I think it would be fair to say, you only have maybe 20 of those goalies capable of taking their team to the Stanley Cup. That’s in the entire world!
Of course you have to acknowledge the stories of Goalies like Binnington who went from playing in the AHL and came up to the NHL and won a Cup for the St.Louis Blues. Or this past season to watch Bobrovsky scratch and claw his way to the Stanley cup finals with the Florida Panthers. However Bobrovsky was a Vezina trophy winning goalie previously but it is fact that he went from Vein to being a backup shortly after. Keep in mind that previously, Binnington was once a highly sought after goaltender in jrs. Something that should be noted, however is growth curves. He was improving in hrs and into his pro career. However, let’s not forget they won the Stanley Cup with him only needing to post a .914 SP in goal. The team around the goalie attributes much to their demise or success.
I don’t buy that Goalies are ‘voodoo’. You know, good for a second, bad the next. You can’t just assume that “goalies are Voodoo”. because you do not fully understand goaltenders.Just because Shersterkin lit the league on fire one season does not mean he is going to be a world stopper the next. Yes there are statistical anomalies in hockey, but good goalies generally remain being good goalies. The year the Rangers advanced further Igor had a slightly lower SP than this past post-season where it was slightly higher. What happened? The team around him makes all the difference.
Goaltenders have lots of equipment designed to help them stop pucks, but their most valuable tool is their brain. It’s what sparks the nerve impulses that travel to the limbs, allowing the goalie to see and react quickly enough to make a save. Goalies that can track the puck well (Follow it with their eyes) can usually be better prepared to stop the puck, regardless of where it bounces because they can anticipate a couple different places it will go. A goalie who can not only track but is also athletic, can quickly readjust their limps to stretch and make that say that makes you go ‘oooooh’.
Goalies are not often drafted young or early in the 1st round in the Pro leagues because they are hard to analyze and the importance of the ‘eye test’ is important when critiquing the position. It’s strange, isn’t it? One of the most universally accepted hockey rules of thumb is that, ‘if you don’t have good goaltending, you can’t win’. The percentages in the expression vary, but you’ve likely heard it said that ‘goaltending is 50 percent of the game for a team, unless you don’t have it, in which case it’s 100 percent.’
“Goaltending is voodoo” became a verbal staple from the analytics community after many frustrated attempts to parse the slightly-better-than-OK from the slightly-worse-than-OK goaltenders went unproven. The goaltender is more difficult to quantify than other aspects of the game. As we said earlier, it requires so much in the brain. It’s a thinking position and as Dwayne Roloson once said as a Goaltending coach, ‘age is not the factor for a goaltender , in fact with age they actually get much better as they think the game better but the problem is, their body must keep up too’. We know the brain does not even finish developing and maturing until the mid-to-late 20s. The part of the brain behind the forehead, called the prefrontal cortex, is one of the last parts to mature. This area is responsible for skills like planning, prioritizing, and making good decisions. Hence the reason why Goaltenders can not yet be predictable enough until they are around 25-26 years of age.
What we need to do in the hockey community is better understand the nuances of the position and why it’s so difficult to analyze. Goaltenders are one-sixth of the game, yet from an analysis perspective, people often minimize it to “just stop the damn puck.” But there’s so much that goes into a goalie’s ability to “just” do that, that we don’t really do it justice.
Let’s face it, how many people analyzing goalies actually know the position? How many have actually played the position? How many understand all that goes behind the training in that position? The vast majority of hockey analysts, don’t study goaltending, yet they weigh in on it almost every day. What do they often get wrong?
I think the biggest thing that gets missed is that there are so many little things that can make a goaltender good versus great but they don’t necessarily show up in the stats sheets. One goalie can have a very technically poor night that ends in a win, or another goalie can have a night where he does everything right but the score sheet only shows what went wrong. That is not like skaters, but since so few analysts know much about the technical aspects of the goaltending position, it’s hard to really get a feel for how to differentiate the nights.
An analyst can explain when a player is slow on his first few strides, lags on his passes or is a stride behind on his decision-making, but you don’t get to hear as much of the explanation for when a goaltender is struggling to set their edges on time, or is reading slowly to one side or the other. It could be they are a step behind with their body when their head is still tracking the puck.
Numbers fail us most when it comes to goaltending. There’s just so many little tips and screens, differing systems and so much luck, it’s really hard to discern who’s elite and who’s just OK. Is it possible to answer those questions with analytics, or is the eye test more valuable with goaltending than it is with evaluating skaters? Measuring with the ‘eye test’ is so much more valuable that it’s almost not even funny. Goaltending is so tied to the rest of the team’s performance that it’s almost impossible to look at any one goaltending statistic in a vacuum in the first place, and it’s even kind of tough to look at the statistics as a whole without looking at the “eye test” for the goaltender.
Also did you know a teams defensive scheme and systems must line up with the type of goaltender you have. Some goalies look like world beaters behind a basic zone defensive structure, while other wander too much. Those goalies tend to be more of a ‘blocking’ style of tender. However in that case those goalies seldom see high quality chances because the zone defence takes the higher quality chances away. Some goalies also can’t keep their mind focused in a game where they see few shots, they require more shots to get into the ‘feel’ of the game. Some goalies also are work horses and need to play 50 plus games a year or it affects their overall feel of play.
A goalie may face 50-60 shots a night, so his GAA is high no matter what, but his actual save percentage is also fairly high. IE: 4.00 GAA VS .930 SP. So looking at one over the other would give you an almost neglectfully incomplete picture.
If you add in the style of play he has though, you get an extra dimension to assess. Maybe they’re so technically precise that they almost hurts themselves in the long run, because they struggle to let their “technical precision” go and make the desperation saves. That tells us that they will do better behind a more structured defence at higher levels or better teams, even though the shots will be faster and tougher. Ask any Goalie in Recreation Leagues or jr’s and they will tell you the same. Play DIV 1 or 2 and even though the shots are faster and harder and more skilled players, it’s so much more predictable for a ‘technical style goalie’. Lower DIV in 4, 5 or even 6 is totally unpredictable and requires more of an athletic goalie who makes desperation saves regularily.
In the end you need to combine shots against, save percentage and the goalies on-ice styles – strengths and weaknesses included – to really get an more accurate picture of how they play and how successful they will be moving forward. It’s really hard to evaluate prospects often because a lot of the time, younger players play in leagues that offer incomplete (or almost non-existent) statistical data sets that take away a whole piece of the puzzle of how to analyze them. Therefore the ‘eye test’ is needed.
Every goaltender we see in the NHL who has a major gap in their technique, have found a way to compensate for it with either a strong defensive structure and good communication on the ice with players or through the tendency to shut down shooting lanes in the areas that they’re weakest in. A great example is a goaltender who overcommits laterally and overlaps his posts to a point where he has to make too many desperation saves, but some when at their peak they have such explosive lateral power, on-ice vision and lower-body agility that they are able to compensate for it. All those splits some goalies make often are a sign they were wildly out of position to begin with, which is a big technical flaw.
Conversely, there are other goalies who have the technique but just haven’t managed to put it all together. I think it’s a bit of an inability to let go in their mind and just be creative with desperation saves. Problem is, when they play behind bad teams, they end up struggling with those moments where they just have to throw technique to the wind and do something stupid to stop the puck. Something also to note is tiny movements affect goaltenders. IE: when a 2 on 1 against is coming down on them, coming out of your crease too early can kill you, if you have to move laterally. An extra foot or two of depth makes the lateral distance seem like miles longer.
The more you watch for how a goalies movement is affected up and down the chain from their heads to hips, the more you’re able to see that guys tend to stutter when it comes to moving off their stronger sides because they don’t like to shift off of the parts of their body that move with the most power. Off-ice kinetic idiosyncrasies make each goalie unique in how they play.
Should you have just read this far into my article, I just want to say the most important thing in analyzing hockey goaltenders is to remain students of the game and be careful to not be thinking your a coach on something you have far too little knowledge on. Something a lot of people on social media miss, is it’s easy to give an opinion but opinions mean little if they do not have actual knowledge and experience behind them.
One last thing to remember about goaltenders , for every measured stop, there’s always one that’s just utter chaos. I have listed a few recommended follows or reads from different pros of the hockey goaltending game for you ‘goalie nerds’ out there. Check them out , you might just enjoy what you read and or hear.
Maria Mountain of Goalie Training Pro ( https://www.goalietrainingpro.com )
Adam Francilia of Net360 – https://alphahockey.ca/net360/
Cole Anderson (former NCAA Goalie) ( https://twitter.com/ice_cole_data )
Kevin Woodley of NHL.com (https://twitter.com/KevinisInGoal )
Marty Biron ( https://twitter.com/martybiron43 )
Keep on Keeping on!
Evan ‘REV’ Renaerts
For more hockey news, different takes or if you want to follow Prospects in Jr hockey give a follow @revingev on TWITTER.
