I wanted to compile some of my thoughts on talent pools over time and era representation before the end of the week.
Era Bias
First, if anybody thinks that comments about the possible overrepresentation of old goalies right now is "era bias" or being unreasonably harsh on earlier eras, well, I guess you must think every top 100 list this forum has ever done was horrendously biased then too. After all, if you look at the top 25 skaters on the most recent top 100 list done by this forum, only
three of the top 25 skaters were born before 1921, and only one of them was born before 1900.
In this round of 9 goalies, representing our #7-15 spots all-time,
six of them were born before 1921, and two of them were born before 1900.
If our top 15 had the same proportions as the top 25 skaters, we'd have a maximum of two goalies born before 1921.
On the flip side, 11 out of the top 25 skaters were born after 1952. We have three already on the list, and one more eligible here, which means we're 2-3 behind the expected representation from the top skaters list.
Now, obviously those are somewhat arbitrary cutoffs. I picked the top 25, you can look at the top 20 or the top 50 or whatever and you'll get some variation in the percentages. And we definitely shouldn't be bound to quotas, we should expect to see some weird stuff happen with the kind of outliers we're talking about on an all-time list (things like having the top four share only two birth years between them).
However, I think the same overall point will remain with any given sample, which is that "we have to be fair to all eras" is not really a compelling defence here, because we're overrepresenting early eras goalies by 2-3x compared to skaters. That's probably not "fair" even if you think that goalies and skaters developed at the same rate. If you think that early goalie development was slower, well, I honestly think you're completely justified in massively breaking with the HOH "conventional wisdom" when it comes to the pre-1921 birth year goalies.
My Attempt At an Objective Measure of the Goalie Talent Pool Over Time
I tried to find what I could use as a reasonable proxy for the talent pool development, and I settled on the percentage of NHL games played that come from goalies born in Ontario or Quebec.
Grouping similar time periods, we get these rough eras:
1918-1927: 96%
1928-1935: 87%
1936-1954: 40%
1955-1968: 60%
1969-1983: 83%
1984-1990: 62%
1991-2004: 49%
2006-2010: 38%
2011-2021: 23%
2022-2024: 13%
To me that seems to roughly track what we would probably subjectively intuit about the goalie talent pool. Almost exclusively ON/QC goalies early on (it would be a bit less if we included other pro leagues like the PCHA, but would still be overwhelming from ON/QC since even the two best Pacific Coast goalies in Lehman and Holmes were from Ontario). A very sharp influx of goalies from outside Central Canada starting in the mid-'30s (which does actually seem to support the
@Michael Farkas theory of a goaltending improvement kicking in right around then). Settling in at a fairly consistent level over the Original Six, then spiking after expansion, to a level that is actually very close to the rate from 1928-1935. (Exactly how sure are we that Charlie Gardiner's NHL competition was much worse than Ken Dryden's? Seems to me both of them were pretty much facing competition almost exclusively from two provinces.)
From the mid-'80s to early '90s expansion, we're about back to Original Six levels, and then we see a drop through the Dead Puck Era, a further drop after 2005, and then since 2010-11 Central Canadian goalies have been a borderline endangered species (which I think pretty clearly reflects a drop in that talent pool compared to prior eras, especially Quebec).
The only thing that doesn't entirely track for me is that I would rate 1955-1968 as quite a bit stronger than 1936-1954, both in terms of elite talent and in depth of talent, but this metric doesn't actually support that view.
Depending on how deep we want to go, we could even add in some of the other pro leagues for the earlier eras where goalie spots were very limited. On the other hand, since we're focusing on outliers here in a Top 60 list, it's probably worth focusing on the very top of the talent pool anyway, and some of the post-expansion years might even benefit from a narrowing down of the sample (say, to goalies with 40+ GP only or something like that). I'm guessing the overall conclusions likely won't change that much either way, though.
This solidifies to me that my top 2 this round are going to be Tretiak and Brimsek. Then I'm particularly interested in Dryden vs. Gardiner, with Belfour also in the mix for the next spots.