Death of the .900 save percentage: Why stopping the puck is so tough for today’s NHL goalies

Credit: Oct 14, 2024; Boston, Massachusetts, USA; A shot by Florida Panthers center Sam Reinhart (13) gets past Boston Bruins goaltender Jeremy Swayman (1) for a goal during the first period at TD Garden. Mandatory Credit: Winslow Townson-Imagn Images

Flash back 10 years. The Edmonton Oilers had tumbled onto the damp concrete floor of the NHL, playing worse than all but two teams, cramming as many ping pong balls into the Draft Lottery as they could, months away from securing Connor McDavid first overall. They were a bad hockey team in pretty much all facets – and their woeful goaltending duo of Ben Scrivens and Viktor Fasth didn’t have a chance. Among 50 goalies that season who played at least 20 games, they ranked 49^th and 50^th in save percentage at .890 and .888. They were two of just four goalies in that sample who posted save percentages below .900. The average NHL goaltender that season carried a .915 mark.

Today, if Scrivens and Fasth stopped pucks at about the same rate? They’d be close to league-average keepers, not the league’s worst. Through NHL games Nov. 11, among goalies who had played at least five games in this young NHL season, 20 sat south of a .900 SV%. The league average sat at exactly .900, which, if it holds, would be the lowest mark in the NHL in 29 years. Just 10 years ago, a whopping 17 netminders posted save percentages of .920 or better. This season: six goalies sat at .920 or better through Monday.

A full look at the trend of league-wide save percentage across the past 30 seasons:

Season	NHL SV%
1994-95	.901
1995-96	.898
1996-97	.905
1997-98	.906
1998-99	.908
1999-00	.904
2000-01	.903
2001-02	.908
2002-03	.909
2003-04	.911
2005-06	.901
2006-07	.905
2007-08	.909
2008-09	.908
2009-10	.911
2010-11	.913
2011-12	.914
2012-13	.912
2013-14	.914
2014-15	.915
2015-16	.915
2016-17	.913
2017-18	.912
2018-19	.910
2019-20	.910
2020-21	.908
2021-22	.907
2022-23	.904
2023-24	.903
2024-25	.900

Why are NHL netminders having such a hard time stopping the puck today? We can’t attribute it to the change in goalie equipment standards as that occurred in 2018-19 and the downward trend has continued for years since. And it’s not as simple as pointing out that scoring is way up in the past half decade and claiming, “offense is better and thus goaltending is worse.” It’s more complicated than that. Scoring chances and shots on goal have also hit multi-decade peaks in recent years, so goalies are facing a higher volume of shots, too, meaning more pucks in the net but also more pucks to save. They’re just not saving as many of them.

What has changed in recent seasons to make the simple task of stopping the puck more difficult than it has been in almost three decades?

I delved into the data and spoke to some goaltending experts in hopes of finding the answer(s).

Bye bye north-south, hello east-west

Tracking back roughly to the NHL’s slashing crackdown that began league-wide in 2017-18, we’ve seen a steady rise in offense as a result of skilled players having more room to move – and a lot more east-west puck movement. According to data shared by ex-NHL goalie Steve Valiquette, a New York Rangers analyst for MSG and CEO of Clear Sight Analytics, east-west play is up 40 percent in the past five NHL seasons. It’s commonly known at this point that the goaltender position has become more taxing as a result, as the constant lateral movement wears the body down and has led to an era of load management and goaltending platoons. But the east-west doesn’t just tire a goalie out; it makes the puck harder to track and stop, period. Not only is the puck more difficult to find when it’s moving that way, but teams are also using the east-west movement to deceive goaltenders, Valiquette explains.

Take, for example, the uber popular reverse VH technique, most famously popularized by the rise of Sergei Bobrovsky, in which a goaltender puts the pad closest to the post parallel to the ice. As a goaltender transitions into that posture, certain holes open up, and now teams are “passing off rebounds” more than ever, as Valiquette puts it. The layman explanation: when a rebound bounces onto your stick, instead of one-timing it, you’re whipping a cross-crease pass to another teammate.

“The passing off rebounds is starting to climb [in the data] because it’s a great opportunity to score – if you are staring at a goalie in his butterfly on a strong-side rebound and you can pass it back across the crease to the weak side,” Valiquette said.

It all ties in to a higher amount of dynamism and unpredictability unfolding in front of goaltenders. A scoring chance isn’t always what it seems to be, and goalies have so much more to think about, says Nashville Predators director of goaltending Mitch Korn, a legendary mentor whose pupils have included Grant Fuhr, Dominik Hasek, Pekka Rinne, Braden Holtby and many more.

“If you look at the way everybody shoots, now you look at the way the teams will pass up a shot for a better play,” Korn said. “You look at the analytics where teams are just not wasting low-danger shots. They’re creating, they’re looking at ways of increasing the danger of a shot with traffic, with deception, with laterals. The game is just very different. [Alex Ovechkin] is an outlier, has always been an outlier, in terms of where he’s scoring from, and there’s not many scoring from those spots anymore.”

De-emphasizing defense

To expand on the east-west play and use of deception: they tie into a greater shift in the action happening in front of an NHL goaltender during the typical game today. Some experts believe the approach to defense has changed – whether it’s because teams simply don’t clear the net as effectively as they used or, more likely, because the NHL’s crosschecking crackdown, which began in earnest last season, has given forwards much more liberty in front of their rivals’ nets.

“I think coaching now, I think players, and I say this respectfully to players, it’s never been easier to get to middle of the ice,” said TSN analyst and former NHLer Jamie McLennan. “As a defenseman, you can’t hook, you can’t hold, you can’t slash now. I think the league is clamped down. So where guys try to get you is, the middle of the ice is a sweet spot.”

Case in point: as Valiquette’s data points out, perimeter shots are way down, screened shots are up and, consequently, top-quality scoring chances are way up.

Here’s a look at the shift in expected goals, scoring chances and high-danger chances averaged per game by every team 10 years ago versus today:

Season	xGF/60	SCF/60	HDSC/60
2013-14	2.58	24.90	10.01
2023-24	3.11	29.02	11.97

So each team is getting roughly four extra scoring chances per game and two extra high-danger scoring chances per game. It’s no wonder we’ve seen expected goals jump by 0.53. When the chance quality is so much higher, it’s understandable why the goalies have so much more trouble stopping them.

Power plays are powered up

In 1989-90, NHL power plays clicked at 20.77 percent. That marked the last time power play efficiency landed north of 20 percent for a 26-season stretch. In 2017-18 the drought ended as teams converted at 20.18 percent, and we’ve now seen them average north of 20 percent for six of the past eight seasons, including four in a row, which last happened in the 1980s. The 2005-06 obstruction crackdown famously yielded a spike in power-play goals, but that was because teams saw the most power-play opportunities per game in NHL history. In the past decade, teams are seeing the fewest opportunities per game now that so many bad habits have been phased out, but the skill level of the game is so high that pucks fly past goaltenders when teams do get power plays.

The aforementioned trends in deceptive puck movement and choosing fewer low-percentage shots apply to power plays, too. As Valiquette theorizes, the player in the bumper role has less intention to shoot than ever and quickly dishes the puck to teammates while the goaltender is vulnerable sliding into reverse VH. Also, thanks to the cross-checking crackdown, net-front attackers have a much less contested path to hang around the opposing team’s goaltender and screen him.

Exodus of stars

While wins are obviously an overrated stat, career win totals can be an exception when they’re huge, as that indicates sustained success. The all-time leaderboard is littered with legendary puck-stoppers, after all. If we look at the top 25 winners in NHL history: five played their final games within the past four years in Roberto Luongo, Henrik Lundqvist, Ryan Miller, Pekka Rinne and Carey Price. We’ve seen a noteworthy exodus of big-name talent from the league in recent years.

The implication here isn’t that goalies are worse today, however. But most of these elite netminders were part of the final generation of true workhorses capable of exceeding 65 or 70 starts in a season. With the position more gruelling than it’s ever been, no NHL goalie has started 70 games in seven years. So while this generation still has amazing goaltenders, most notably Connor Hellebuyck, Igor Shesterkin and, until last season, Andrei Vasilevskiy, the best of the best aren’t playing as much. With duos and trios the norm, teams are using their second- or third-best options more often – and teams have to learn to play in front of different goaltenders with different strengths and weaknesses more often.

“What is there, eight starters in the league? Seven clear-cut?” McLennan said. “Everyone else is tandem. Teams have to be a lot different with a tandem goaltender situation because there’s no clear-cut guy.”

In 2015-16, when save percentage last sat at its all-time high average of .915, 10 goalies cleared 60 starts, while 19 goaltenders started at least 50 games, and 17 of them had a SV% of .914 or better. The best guys were playing a lot and impacting the league average a lot. Last season, three goalies cleared 60 starts, while 14 cleared 50.

On top of the best goalies in the game having less of an impact because their pieces of the starting pies are smaller: it’s tougher year over year to tell who the best goalies are. Just three of the NHL’s top 10 in SV% from 2022-23 returned to the top 10 in 2023-24. According to Korn, it’s reflective of a game that is less about Hero Goalies carrying teams and more governed by team play.

“Watching the National Hockey League and watching the skill level and watching the speed and continuing to see the improvement in sticks, watching the deception…all those things over the last few years has made playing goaltender more difficult than ever before,” Korn said. “And I really believe that the goalie results rely on the team more than ever before.”

Linus Ullmark, for instance, delivered one of the greatest seasons by a goaltender this century in 2022-23, when the defensively stingy Boston Bruins set an NHL record with 65 wins. Ullmark was the best goaltender in the league by any metric, so he deserved his Vezina Trophy, but he also carried one of the lowest expected goals against marks in the league, reflective of the stellar team play in front of him. His numbers became much more mortal next season – along with the entire Bruins team, which played middling defense and won 18 fewer games. So Korn has a point.

Will the pendulum swing back?

The thing we’ve learned about all trends in the NHL: they don’t last forever. It was Dead Puck in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which gave way to an offensive boom in The New NHL coming out of the 2005-06 lockout, and by 2014-15 Jamie Benn won the Art Ross Trophy with just 87 points as the offense dried up again. Now we’re seeing guys get 100 assists in a year. Back and forth the pendulum swings. That means goalies, despite more chaos in front of them than ever and smaller equipment than the Michelin Man heyday of 20 years ago, can’t be counted out. They’re already finding ways to adjust.

“Goalies play deeper in the net across the NHL, they tend to be larger so they can play deeper in the net, and they are traveling shorter distances to get there so they can remain close to the puck – what we call ‘under the puck,’ ” Korn said. “You remember the good old days, in the white paint, they’d be drifting out if you watch all of that. So the goalie technique is high-speed chess now. It used to be almost checkers, but playing goal is high-speed chess and the opponent is the shooter’s chess – way more cerebral, way more skilled than checkers.”

The masked men will have their day again. But for now: enjoy the sub-.900 save percentages, 6-5 games and 69-goal seasons…even if the goalies won’t.

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