Oiler goaltending: it’s more the goalies than the defense

Yesterday, guest columnist Frjohnk dug into war-on-ice’s high/medium/low danger assessment of shots to try to get a bead on the true state of the Oiler defense and Oiler goaltending.

The Oiler D as you’d expect did not look so good, giving up a higher than average amount of dangerous shots.  But NOT the worst in the league as many assume when they look at the Oiler goaltending.

Speaking of Oiler goaltending, Frjohnk’s analysis suggested that if the Oiler defense was a tire fire, then the Oiler goaltending was a tire fire in a dumpster.   Rolling around on the deck of the Titanic.  In a hurricane.

Dead last in sv% for easy shots.

Dead last in sv% for medium shots.

Talk about soul crushing.

And the kicker – not quite dead last in difficult shots.  That’s right – the Oiler goalies were actually better relative to the league at stopping dangerous shots then they were stopping the easy ones.  Must be all the practice.

Anyway, I figured I would try and do a slightly different take on breaking down goalies using the shot categories.  Assess each one based on their performance in each category against the other goalies quantitatively.  But rather than give numbers (which quickly become meaningless) or rankings (which put too fine a grain on it, as if there is really any difference between the 1 and 2 or the 28 and 29th ranked in any category!) … I figure I’ll try and express it qualitatively.  (I tried visually but it was too damn much work to make it look good).

Not only would this put the Oiler goalie performance in perspective, but perhaps help isolate which goalies we think might be good candidates for MacT to dither on, er, I mean go after this summer.

*** Warning: take absolutely everything I post below with a grain of salt.  These are goalies, for Gord’s sake.  They’re voodoo. ***

I’ll throw charts at you first, and then, for those interested, a short discussion on how the ratings were devised.  First, for an overview, how all goalies did at EV this year:

Goaltender EV Sv% (games > 9)

See that little bar captioned 89.4 over on the left?  There’s two goalies stuck in that bar.  Their names are Fasth and Scrivens.

Using the war-on-ice data, I pulled the H/L/M difficulty sv% for each goalie, then applied an assessment based on where it fit on the distribution of how all goalies did in their category.

Here’s the list, along with a categorical description.

Name	Sv%	SvLSD Rating	SvMSD Rating	SvHSD Rating
Calvin.Pickard	95	Elite	Elite	Elite
Scott.Darling	94.8	Slightly above to above average	Vezina	Vezina
Steve.Mason	94.37	Elite	Vezina	Slightly above to above average
Carey.Price	94.27	Way above average	Elite	Way above average
Antti.Raanta	94.21	Way above average	Average to slightly above	Vezina
Andrew.Hammond	94.06	Slightly above to above average	Slightly above to above average	Vezina
Keith.Kinkaid	93.7	Slightly below to below average	Slightly above to above average	Vezina
Craig.Anderson	93.69	Average to slightly above	Elite	Slightly above to above average
Pekka.Rinne	93.62	Slightly above to above average	Slightly above to above average	Way above average
Devan.Dubnyk	93.62	Slightly above to above average	Slightly above to above average	Way above average
Cory.Schneider	93.44	Slightly above to above average	Way above average	Way above average
Roberto.Luongo	93.14	Average to slightly below	Average to slightly above	Way above average
Reto.Berra	93.12	Slightly above to above average	Slightly above to above average	Way above average
Tuukka.Rask	93.09	Slightly above to above average	Elite	Average to slightly below
Petr.Mrazek	93.07	Average to slightly above	Way above average	Slightly above to above average
Cam.Talbot	93.04	Average to slightly below	Way above average	Way above average
Corey.Crawford	93.04	Elite	Slightly above to above average	Slightly above to above average
Ondrej.Pavelec	93	Way above average	Slightly above to above average	Slightly above to above average
Henrik.Lundqvist	92.99	Average to slightly above	Way above average	Average to slightly above
Braden.Holtby	92.94	Average to slightly below	Average to slightly above	Way above average
Jonathan.Quick	92.78	Way above average	Average to slightly above	Slightly above to above average
Andrei.Vasilevskiy	92.75	Way below average	Average to slightly above	Vezina
Jonas.Hiller	92.71	Average to slightly below	Way above average	Way above average
Marc-Andre.Fleury	92.64	Elite	Slightly above to above average	Slightly above to above average
Brian.Elliott	92.58	Average to slightly above	Elite	Average to slightly below
Michael.Hutchinson	92.56	Way above average	Slightly above to above average	Average to slightly above
Niklas.Svedberg	92.49	Slightly above to above average	Elite	Average to slightly above
Sergei.Bobrovsky	92.47	Average to slightly below	Way above average	Average to slightly above
Michal.Neuvirth	92.45	Way above average	Average to slightly below	Slightly above to above average
John.Gibson	92.42	Vezina	Slightly below to below average	Slightly below to below average
Jaroslav.Halak	92.26	Average to slightly below	Average to slightly above	Way above average
Thomas.Greiss	92.21	Average to slightly below	Average to slightly above	Way above average
Antti.Niemi	92.19	Slightly above to above average	Way above average	Average to slightly below
Jonathan.Bernier	92.18	Average to slightly below	Slightly above to above average	Slightly above to above average
Jimmy.Howard	92.15	Average to slightly above	Slightly above to above average	Average to slightly above
Frederik.Andersen	92.09	Average to slightly below	Slightly above to above average	Average to slightly above
Eddie.Lack	92.08	Elite	Elite	Average to slightly below
Jake.Allen	92.01	Way below average	Average to slightly below	Elite
Ben.Bishop	91.99	Slightly above to above average	Slightly above to above average	Average to slightly above
Semyon.Varlamov	91.85	Average to slightly below	Slightly above to above average	Average to slightly above
Karri.Ramo	91.85	Average to slightly below	Slightly above to above average	Slightly above to above average
Martin.Jones	91.57	Average to slightly below	Average to slightly above	Average to slightly above
Jhonas.Enroth	91.51	Average to slightly below	Way above average	Average to slightly below
Kari.Lehtonen	91.42	Average to slightly above	Average to slightly above	Average to slightly above
Ryan.Miller	91.41	Slightly below to below average	Way below average	Way above average
Anders.Lindback	91.37	Slightly below to below average	Way above average	Slightly below to below average
Curtis.McElhinney	91.29	Way above average	Average to slightly above	Slightly below to below average
Cam.Ward	91.28	Average to slightly below	Average to slightly above	Average to slightly below
James.Reimer	91.27	Average to slightly below	Average to slightly above	Slightly above to above average
Ray.Emery	91.27	Vezina	Slightly below to below average	Average to slightly below
Mike.Smith	91.21	Average to slightly above	Average to slightly above	Average to slightly below
Dustin.Tokarski	91.05	Slightly above to above average	Average to slightly below	Slightly below to below average
Alex.Stalock	91.03	Vezina	Slightly above to above average	Slightly below to below average
Robin.Lehner	90.89	Terrible	Average to slightly below	Average to slightly above
Darcy.Kuemper	90.72	Average to slightly below	Terrible	Average to slightly below
Carter.Hutton	90.56	Terrible	Terrible	Slightly above to above average
Anton.Khudobin	90.3	Slightly above to above average	Way above average	Way below average
Chad.Johnson	90.07	Slightly above to above average	Average to slightly below	Slightly below to below average
Ben.Scrivens	89.98	Terrible	Average to slightly below	Average to slightly below
Al.Montoya	89.59	Way below average	Terrible	Average to slightly below
Viktor.Fasth	89.58	Terrible	Horrawful	Slightly above to above average
Evgeni.Nabokov	89.56	Horrawful	Average to slightly below	Average to slightly below
Rob.Zepp	88.89	Terrible	Horrawful	Slightly below to below average
Justin.Peters	88.7	Way above average	Terrible	Terrible
Niklas.Backstrom	88.6	Average to slightly above	Slightly below to below average	Horrawful

Oiler goalies: not good.  Especially at the easy shots, as Frjohnk showed.

Arguments that its because they were overwhelmed by the defensive tire fire are a bit challenged by the fact that both goalies, especially Fasth, were not that bad in stopping the ‘really dangerous’ shots.  It looks to me that its mostly the goalies.

It might be the team e.g. a poisoned atmosphere, bad goalie coaching, etc.  But it’s still the goalies, not the defense.

As for the future …

Cam Talbot may indeed be the right guy to backstop a tire fire … but small samples.

Martin Jones?  No thanks.

Cory Schneider really is good.  Another reason to say:  F*** YOU CANUCKS.

Other surprises I thought: Marc-Andre Fleury has had a decent year.  Eddie Lack is like the anti-Fasth.  Ryan Miller is like the anti-Lack.  Antti Niemi might not be that bad.  Neuvirth might be good – but not great.  Between Berra and Ramo, the Flames might have kept the wrong one.  Pavelec really has had a good year – at 27, he may be hitting his stride, that’s the same age that Kipper became a good ‘un.

*** Warning: take absolutely everything I posted above with a grain of salt.  These are goalies, for Gord’s sake.  They’re voodoo. ***

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How I did what I did:

• Pulled H/M/L EV save %
• normalize relative to mean and standard deviation
• cut the resulting distribution into ten categories, in order of worst to best:  ‘Horrawful’, ‘Terrible’, ‘Way below average’, ‘Slightly below to below average’, ‘Average to slightly below’, ‘Average to slightly above’, ‘Slightly above to above average’, ‘Way above average’, ‘Elite’, ‘Vezina’
• Paste as a table above