HOH Top 60 Goaltenders of All Time (2024 Edition) - Round 2, Vote 2

[The Pale King]

Edit: I had posted my initial rankings here... rescinding them as I adjust them a bit more. Sorry!

 

[Hockey Outsider]

The idea of era bunching is the most salient point. Perhaps the way to disband it is to find parallels for goalies across eras. For example, when I read of the intelligent demeanor and calm play of Vezina, my mind links him with Plante. A pair of great but flawed goaltenders like Dryden and Durnan seem a match. Brimsek seems really excellent, a goalie's goalie, in a sphere with Kiprusoff, Lundqvist, Price...

???

This is a great point. It's easier said than done (and I realize I'm also saying this as a non participant) but the best to avoid this pitfall would be to find-cross era similarities. Otherwise it's too easy to simply compare peers.

 

[Michael Farkas]

You don't think things like the technological advancement in sticks have made the goalies' jobs harder? General improvement in the average NHLer?


I don't think we would be ranking them if this was the case.

Well, why would you abandon the "versus peers" part of your thought process for technology? Stick got whippier. Pads got bigger and more adaptable to the prevailing style. Goalies got more mobile with advances in skate technology, pads being lighter but still protective, not absorbing water, etc.

If goalie pads didn't advance AND shooters could shoot like this now, every game would be 18-16. Save percentage might actually matter haha

Goalies stop ~98% of untipped, unscreened shots. I think they're doing just fine...

##

I don't understand your response for the second point, respectfully.

 

[The Pale King]

This is what I've got so far:

Tretiak
Brimsek

Dryden
Durnan
Gardiner

Vezina
Broda
Belfour

Benedict

 

[rmartin65]

Well, why would you abandon the "versus peers" part of your thought process for technology? Stick got whippier. Pads got bigger and more adaptable to the prevailing style. Goalies got more mobile with advances in skate technology, pads being lighter but still protective, not absorbing water, etc.

I think what I said is consistent with my arguments- just because the goalie position gets easier or harder doesn’t mean the goalies should be considered better or worse. I judge them by relative to their peers first and foremost.

If goalie pads didn't advance AND shooters could shoot like this now, every game would be 18-16. Save percentage might actually matter haha

Goalies stop ~98% of untipped, unscreened shots. I think they're doing just fine...

I guess today’s skaters aren’t that great then, since they can’t beat the goalies cleanly.

##

I don't understand your response for the second point, respectfully.

If all that matters is representation, then why are we ranking them? We should just put out an unranked list of names saying these 60- in some order- are the 60 greatest of all time.

 

[Michael Farkas]

If all that matters is representation, then why are we ranking them? We should just put out an unranked list of names saying these 60- in some order- are the 60 greatest of all time.

Well, that's your claim, right? That every era needs to be represented - more or less. "No era should be ignored" to paraphrase.

So instead of Vezina being 9th overall, can't his era be represented by him at 27th?

 

[overpass]

I would love if Tretiak, Vezina, Gardiner, and Brimsek were the four that got in this round. Then everyone with widespread support as the best goalie ever would be in.

I'm going to make one more post about Durnan and Brimsek. I can understand opinions differ and if the panel ends up putting Brimsek ahead, that's fine. But I'm puzzled by your assessment that has Brimsek with more support for best goalie ever than Durnan. I'd like to unpack this assessment a bit and discuss the evidence we're using.

I'll direct these questions to you because of your post above, but I'm equally interested in hearing from other participants who share the assessments that contemporaries rated Brimsek over Durnan, and that Brimsek had more support than Durnan for greatest of all time

First, why are you not putting more weight on the 1958 Sport Magazine All-Star team? And second, why are you not putting more weight on the seasonal all-star and award voting by writers and coaches?

The 1958 Sport Magazine team
I'm all for researching and posting quotes by writers about who they consider to be the greatest goaltender ever. I've done it too and I appreciate you and others who have done so. But there are also some potential biases in researching these quotes. Most papers aren't archived so you're reading a limited selection of opinions. I know almost all of you are reading English papers only, so you're missing many of the Quebec papers. Is your search methodology unbiased? Even if your method is consistent, are you sure the names of different goalies are equally recognized by your search tools?

Fortunately there's a large repository of opinions, collected in an unbiased manner, that we can go to. I've posted before about the 1958 Sport Magazine all-time all-star hockey team. There was also some discussion of that team here in 2015. They polled 70 writers and broadcasters for their all-time starting six. Bill Durnan received more votes than any other goaltender and was the goalie for their all-time team.

G: Bill Durnan
D: Eddie Shore
D: Doug Harvey
LW: Gordie Howe
C: Howie Morenz
RW: Maurice Richard

Unfortunately we don't know how many votes Durnan received. Maybe it was 40 out of 70, maybe it was 20. It's likely it was fewer votes than the others, as the goalie position had the most players named with votes. Frank Brimsek, Terry Sawchuk, Chuck Gardiner, Turk Broda, Roy Worters, George Hainsworth were named as also receiving votes, which is a pretty wide spread. I don't know if those names are in order, it's possible but not terribly relevant.

What we do know for sure is that in 1958, from a relatively large sample of 70 voters, Durnan received more votes as the best ever than Brimsek did. More than Sawchuk. More than Broda, more than Gardiner, more than any other goalie in history to that point.

If you found one writer in 1958 naming Brimsek as the best of all time, or Durnan as the best of all time, you'd consider it a find, right? If you found ten quotes, that would be amazing. We have 70 votes and Durnan was #1. Shouldn't this result be taken a little more seriously?

I'm a little surprised that Terry Sawchuk wasn't considered #1 at that point. He was only a year younger than Howe, and he had played roughly exactly as many NHL seasons to that point as Bill Durnan had. If you're valuing the opinions of contemporary journalists, aren't you impressed by the fact that more picked Bill Durnan's career than picked the first half of Sawchuk's career, including his incredible five year peak?

Awards voting vs quotes
For that matter, if we're talking about opinions of writers, why aren't we taking their end of season all-star and awards votes more seriously? Bill Durnan was six times voted to the first all-star team as goalie, the most in 20 years of all-star voting. If you found a quote from a writer before the playoffs saying something like "Bill Durnan was the best goalie of the regular season", would you give that any value? If so, you know the league office collected and aggregated those opinions, issued all-star teams and awards based on them, and paid out bonus money to the winners, right? The people you're quoting are the same people who voted for the all-star teams and awards.

I realize single season assessments are less valuable than career assessments. If you don't put any weight on quotes about single seasons, feel free to disregard. But if you do value such quotes, aren't awards votes the same type of thing as a quote about performance in a season? They're both an assessment of the goalie. A vote is lower resolution than a quote, but collected with a larger sample and more systematically.

If you value the assessments of players and coaches over writers, fair enough. Did you know the coaches did the all-star voting for the 1946-47 through 1949-50 seasons? 3 of Durnan's 6 first team all-stars were based on coaches voting. If you found a quote from Frank Boucher in March of 1949 saying Durnan was the best goalie that season, would you value that opinion? If so, fortunately for you, the league office collected his opinion and that of the five other coaches!

Forgive the length. I'm interested to see responses because I have long thought based on my reading that Bill Durnan had substantial support for the greatest of all time well after his retirement, and I don't think his rating in this section has reflected that support.