Crease Crapshoot: Why NHL goaltender is the most volatile position in pro sports

Credit: Connor Ingram (© Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports)

“In this crease…the man with the supposed worst contract in the league…benched in favor of the third-stringer at the start of the playoffs…Sergei Bobrovsky!”

“And in this crease…a man who started the season as the backup to a backup to a backup to an injured starter…Adin Hill!”

What was crazier: the fact that Bobrovsky and Hill faced off as the Florida Panthers’ and Vegas Golden Knights’ No. 1 goalies in the 2023 Stanley Cup Final after opening the playoffs on the bench? Or the fact that it constituted a legitimately great matchup as they’d both been so damn good to that point?

Bobrovsky entered the Final on a seemingly invincible run in which he’d gone 12-3 with a .931 save percentage in his previous 15 postseason games, helping the Panthers to upsets over the Boston Bruins, Toronto Maple Leafs and Carolina Hurricanes. Hill, meanwhile, took over for injured Laurent Brossoit, who had taken over for injured Logan Thompson, who had take over for injured Robin Lehner. Hill was en route to finishing the playoffs with a .932 SV% and backstopping Vegas to the Stanley Cup.

Surely, we all saw those performances coming.

A couple weeks later: the Vezina Trophy went to the Bruins’ Linus Ullmark. He entered the 2022-23 season with a .913 career SV% and 0.0 award votes or all-star nods in his career, so, naturally, at 29 years old, in his eighth NHL season, he delivered one of the greatest campaigns of any goalie in modern history: 40-6-1, 1.89 goals-against average, .938 SV%.

Peruse the save percentage leaderboard halfway through the 2023-24 season and…while Hill sits atop the group, he’s joined by newbies such as Alex Lyon (fourth), Joey Daccord (fifth), Charlie Lindgren (seventh), Alex Nedeljkovic (eighth), Joseph Woll (ninth) and Connor Ingram (10th). Some of last season’s most dominant goaltenders, from Filip Gustavsson to Ilya Samsonov, have fallen off the map. Even the supposed consistent stud starters in net, such as Andrei Vasilevskiy and Juuse Saros, are barely keeping their chins above the .900 mark.

There simply isn’t a more random position minute to minute, period to period, game to game, season to season than NHL goaltender. In the past five seasons, the top 10 in save percentage has turned over by 10, seven, 10, eight and seven names, respectively. From 1989 through 2011, a period representing the heyday of legends Patrick Roy, Ed Belfour, Dominik Hasek and Marty Brodeur, 10 goalies won the Vezina in a 22-season span. We’ve since seen 11 different Vezina winners in the past 12 seasons, including six consecutive first-time winners.

Why is it so difficult for the best goaltenders on the planet to remain at the top of the heap these days? And why does it seem like an AHL or, heck, ECHL goaltender emerges out of nowhere to become a dominant NHL puck-stopper every season?

I picked the brains of two former NHL goaltenders turned analysts, Steve Valiquette and Mike McKenna, in hopes of better understanding why the position is the most volatile it’s ever been.

Valiquette, now a Rangers analyst for MSG and CEO of Clear Sight Analytics, spent the majority of his career with the New York Rangers between 2003-04 and 2009-10. He consistently got an up-close look at future Hall of Famer Henrik Lundqvist. One thing that always stood out: the notion that Lundqvist arrived on the scene in 2005-06 as something of a finished product. He had already played 150-plus games at the pro level with Frolunda in Sweden and faced NHLers during the 2004-05 lockout. By the time he joined the Rangers in 2005-06, he was confident he could hack it – and did.

Valiquette lists countless other examples of goaltenders who saw lots of reps in the minors before becoming NHL fixtures and benefitted from time during the 2004-05 lockout: Marc-Andre Fleury, Ryan Miller, Cam Ward and so on. Back then, the salary cap was brand new and GMs were just learning how to allocate their dollars. Today, they understand how valuable an entry-level AAV can be and, as a result, we’re seeing fewer goalies get the requisite 100-200 games of pro seasoning before playing at the NHL level, Valiquette says. That partially explains why mega-hyped netminders like Samsonov, Carter Hart and Spencer Knight impressed upon their NHL arrivals only to regress and battle ups and downs from season to season. None of them came remotely close to getting 100 pro games before the NHL, let alone 200. Same goes for the Dallas Stars’ Jake Oettinger, who logged just 54 AHL games before reaching The Show. He seemed invincible before his play dipped this season. It’s worth noting Ilya Sorokin, one of the most consistently excellent NHL netminders of the past half decade, played 244 games in the KHL before he suited up for the New York Islanders.

Still, the theory isn’t perfect. Plenty of the sport’s more dominant netminders, from Connor Hellebuyck to Vasilevskiy, played fewer than 100 minor-pro games. A lack of seasoning explains the struggles of some young phenoms – the latest being the Buffalo Sabres’ Devon Levi – but doesn’t apply universally.

Another principle possibly playing a role in today’s volatility: load management. It’s universally accepted that the position has never been more difficult to play. As Valiquette explains, with skater skill at an all-time high and the rule crackdowns opening up play, east-west scoring chances have increased 41 percent in the NHL over the past five seasons. This year alone, he explains, expected save percentages league-wide are down 12 percent as the scoring-chance quality continues to skyrocket. In 2017-18, team shots on goal per game exceeded 31 for the first time in more than 30 years; after that, they stayed at 31 or higher in five of the next six seasons. The position is the most physically taxing it has ever been.

That’s why teams rarely send their No. 1s out for 60-plus starts a year anymore. In the 2000s, we saw 108 instances in which a goalie started 60 or more games, and that was with no 2004-05 season. The 2010s: 84, including a shortened 2012-13 season. In the first three seasons of the 2020s: 12, and that’s with 32 teams. As Valiquette points out, a massive portion of the 60-plus generation just recently retired, includlng Lundqvist, Roberto Luongo, Ryan Miller and Pekka Rinne. The workhorse is going extinct.

Today’s generation of goalies tends to require and receive more rest. The downside of the extra recovery time: it’s tougher to establish a consistent routine and feel for the game.

“Henrik said the hardest part was always coming back if it was three or four games between starts, because the other guy played and he had to wait,” Valiquette said. “He was always at his best if it was just play every other night, get into a rhythm, practise into a rhythm. I remember (Rangers goalie coach) Benoit Allaire, if we had a day off Monday, he would say on Tuesday’s practice, ‘Guys, don’t be too hard on yourselves today because you had a day off yesterday.’ And I was always thinking, ‘Why’s he saying this? It’s only one day. Why does that matter? I got to the point where I said, ‘Benny, what’s up with the one day? It’s only one day.’ And he’s like, ‘Vali,’ you guys are like finally tuned guitars, you can’t miss a day.’

“[Cellist] Yo-Yo Ma, said, ‘If I miss one day of practice, I notice. If I miss two days of practice, my wife notices. And if I miss three or more days of practice, the world notices.”

Is it any wonder then, that Hellebuyck, the busiest goalie in the game, the throwback to another time, is the most reliably great puck-stopper in the game? Last season, he explained to me that he’s a “rhythm goalie” who thrives on heavy workloads. He has started 28 games more than the second-busiest goaltender since he debuted in the NHL in 2015-16. He’s a virtual lock to finish in the top four of the Vezina vote for a fifth time in the past seven years and has an excellent chance to win the award for the second time.

Hellebuyck, who is so cerebral that McKenna believes his ability to read the play is peerless in today’s game, might simply be a unicorn.

Another reason why we might see so much variance in the pack year to year among the non-Hellebuyck population, McKenna theorizes, is team performance.

Look at the Boston Bruins, for instance. In the past 10 seasons, they’ve finished top-four in expected goals against per 60 at 5-on-5 nine times. Over that span, they’ve had a goalie post a .915 SV% or better 14 times; yes, that’s more than one of their goalies per season. That accomplishment is spread across six different netminders: Ullmark (twice), Jeremy Swayman (twice), Tuukka Rask (six times), Jaroslav Halak (twice), Chad Johnson (once) and Niklas Svedberg (once). The Bruins are so good defensively that their No. 2 goalies thrive almost as much as their No. 1s do.

On the flip side, the Ottawa Senators have had five instances during that decade-long span in which a goalie posted a .915 or better. They’ve also a been a bad hockey team for much of that stretch.

“Goaltending performance is so dependent on the team in front of them,” McKenna said. “Everyone has been beating up the Ottawa Senators for their goaltending for how long? And that team’s been atrocious defensively forever now. At some point you have to look at what’s in playing in front of the goalies and realize, that’s just them.”

Team variance can explain why Ullmark went from average in Buffalo to a world beater in Boston. Same goes for Adin Hill. Notice how seemingly every goalie in a Vegas Golden Knights uniform excels? And look at the journey of Joonas Korpisalo over the past season and a half: passable in a Blue Jackets uniform, dominant upon joining the stingy L.A. Kings late last spring, struggling through his first season with, you guessed it, the goalie graveyard that is the Ottawa Senators.

But it’s not like Daccord in Seattle and Ingram in Arizona are backed by juggernauts this season. Before Jordan Binnington’s legendary 2018-19 run began, the St. Louis Blues were a last-place team. Why is it that, every year, a goaltender previously on a career-backup trajectory becomes a star?

McKenna believes the optimization of the position could be responsible. With the amount of coaching and instruction that goes into it today, virtually every pro brings an incredibly high technical standard to his game. So many netminders are elite skaters these days; he singles out Saros and Igor Shesterkin. If almost all of them play the position the correct technical way, it explains the “next man up” phenomenon in which a team’s third or even fourth goaltender slides into the lineup and looks like a first-team all-star.

Or, as Valiquette puts it: sometimes a hot run just happens to fall at the right time. Think Binnington in 2019. Cam Ward in 2006. Matt Murray in 2016.

“How can you qualify or quantify a hot run? Every goalie will say, ‘how come there are days where it’s big as a pea, and other days it’s as big as a soccer ball?’ Did the goaltender who won the Stanley Cup that nobody expected just hit the right ladder or stride toward being on top of his game? Because no matter what, every goalie who ever plays in the NHL will hit their peak at some point.”

The great irony of the position: experts have never known more about it, from drawing on advance stats to deploying effective techniques like the reverse VH. And yet…it has never been more challenging to understand and predict.

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Crease Crapshoot: Why NHL goaltender is the most volatile position in pro sports

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