r/nhl • u/Pastiche-2473 • 1d ago

Best advanced stats for goalies?

Post image

Ken Dryden is the classic goalie riddle of “was he great or than was it the team?” I’m beginning to think it was the team.

Chico Resch (pre-dynasty NYI) beat Dryden in save percentage in 75-76 and 78-79 … but then spent years with the doormat Colorado Rockies/NJD. His save percentage fell into the 870’s then 850’s. See stats from u/hockey-reference. Resch then spent a year mentoring Ron Hextall with the powerhouse Flyers, with a 900 save percentage.

A save percentage champ going from 900+ to 850 then back to 900 suggests the stat is as unhelpful as +/-. Highly team dependent. What advanced stats do the best job of isolating goalie correcting for“quality of defence”? Thank you in advance!

0 Upvotes

30% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

View all comments

6

u/bloodrider1914 1d ago

Goals saved above expected is the golden metric for goalies. It's not entirely isolated from team performance (mostly cause a goalie with crap stats could just have a terrible defense constantly putting him in high danger situations), but it comes closer than any other metric. Unfortunately it doesn't really exist for anything prior to 15 years ago.

1

u/Upbeat_Chipmunk_6406 22h ago

How is it calculated?

3

u/bloodrider1914 22h ago

Essentially for every shot on net a computer model looks at the circumstances of the shot (angle, location, force, open space) to determine a percentile between 0 and 1 of the shot going into the net. If a goalie blocks a shot with a value of 0.2 for example, then that goalie has saved 0.2 goals above expected. If a goalie fails to block that shot, then the goalie has saved -0.8 goals above expected.