The save percentage-GSAA debate

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I'll never understand - especially today (meaning, the last 25-30 years or so - how GAA is a team stat and save pct is an individual stat. They are both impacted, chiefly, by the exact same thing: goals against.



Save is the expected result. It has no real value to the game. However, the single biggest emotional influence on the game is a bad goal against. Every goalie is giving up two goals...so what difference does it make if you do it on 17 shots or 34 shots?



I remember an old argument about Ovechkin's shooting percentage back in the day...some folks calling him a "volume shooter" and remarking about how underwhelming that 10 or 11 (or whatever) percent scoring rate is...but my thought is: you'd be upset if Ovechkin was a 10% shooter on 1000 shots? Of course not.



It's a touch disingenuous maybe, but - generally speaking - no one gives a rat's behind about shots or shooting percentage for players...but somehow the same stat is considered gospel for goaltenders...



And then you throw in that, to some degree, teams can control the amount of shots they give up from a tactical perspective. Like the old Claude Julien Bruins were all about giving up perimeter shots, then they'd eat rebounds with some of the great box out men that they had...so, you sit there and allow long shots, you pump up save pct numbers for virtually any goalie that walked through the door...meanwhile, you look at some of the DPE Devils teams, they defended lines and fought against shots (back then, longer shots were still threatening). So NJ protected lines, more than their net, so that forced dump-ins, and limited shots. So, Brodeur takes a lot of flack for not having an amazing save pct. but that is not representative of his play...because, like I said, everyone gives up 2...so what choice did Brodeur have? He didn't give up 3, because otherwise, who cares...? No one's talking about the guy giving up 3. Should he have given up 1? Then there'd be no discussion, he'd be clearly the best ever.



It might be interesting to see what save percentages look like on certain chances broken down by shot location on the net...but in its current state of "every shot is equal", it doesn't do much for me.



Though, there's that thread floating around where me and a former pro goalie sat down and put goaltenders into tiers of talent and compared it against their save pct. It's not like save pct. has an inverse relationship with talent or anything...but I just don't know how many times save pct. has to spit out completely random names at the top of it before folks start to go, "hmm, ya know, maybe we better take a different angle on this..."



Plus/minus got thrown away when it started spitting names like Andrej Mezsaros and what's his ass on Washington that washed out of the l

Save % is impacted more by the # of shots faced than goals allowed. For a simple example:

A goalie with a 3.00 GAA against 40 shots per game has a .925 sv%

A goalie with a 2.00 GAA against 20 shots per game has a .900 sv%
 
That a strange premise.

In 1998-1999, some teams were giving up 3.5 goals a game, some 2.05 goals a game:

The big difference between the Sabres giving up only 2.13 goals against versus the Canucks giving up 3.15 was not shots against it was a .929 save percentage versus a .893.

How much Hasek being better than Garth Snow is being expressed here versus the teams they played for or who they played against can be debated, but when Hasek was not in net and replaced by an quality number 2 goaltender in the upcoming Dwayne Roloson, it was nothing special.

Under that rounding error, some years everyone was scoring 0 goals, just look at the emotional boost of when the rare goal got scored.

We could look instead of goal let in against instead of save, .900 becoming 0.1, it would be more speaking and how big the difference between .925 and .900 would become way more obvious to some and would remove all the talk about save is the expected result, but obviously it would be the exact same statistic.

Hasek vs Snow is more than a goal per game difference...why is it not "expressed" by that...?

Save % is impacted more by the # of shots faced than goals allowed. For a simple example:

A goalie with a 3.00 GAA against 40 shots per game has a .925 sv%

A goalie with a 2.00 GAA against 20 shots per game has a .900 sv%

Goalie stops 18 of 19 - save pct. = .947 (god tier)
Goalie stops 18 of 20 - save pct. = .900 (horrendous, apparently)
 
Wins is a team stat

GAA is a team defence stat

Save % is an individual stat that is influenced by team defence, and to some degree, team success.
No, this is not true....all three are, of course, both influenced by the goaltender and everybody else on the ice (on both teams). But, none of them should ever be considered indivual stats. They simply are not.

If you have to choose one to tell you the most about the goaltender, certainly you pick Save Percentage.

But there's not a huge difference between Save Percentage and GAA. To say that one is about the goalie and the other is about the team is silly.

Generally, in games, the team that wins also has the best GAA and the best Save Percentage in that game (obviously). In fact, in the vast majority of games, the winning team has the best Save Percentage. Does that mean the goaltender is responsible for this vast majority of wins? Of course not.

In a 3 to 1 game (with no empty netters), we do not need to watch the game, we do not even need to know the shot totals (unless the shots are hugely out of whack)....we know from the score alone which goalie had the best Save Percentage....but we obviously do not know which goalie performed better.
 
Though, there's that thread floating around where me and a former pro goalie sat down and put goaltenders into tiers of talent and compared it against their save pct. It's not like save pct. has an inverse relationship with talent or anything...but I just don't know how many times save pct. has to spit out completely random names at the top of it before folks start to go, "hmm, ya know, maybe we better take a different angle
Yes...I've always thought about a list of Save Percentage leaders (for, say, a full season) as being a Mish Mash, and I think it's pretty reasonable to think of it this way.

So...create two factors: 1) the goaltender and 2).the team (the team referring to the defensive play of the forwards and defensemen).

Divide both of them into 5 groups: great, good, average, below-average, poor.

So, the Save Percentage leaders would consist of something like this (but not in this order):

Great goalie; great team
Great goalie; good team
Great goalie; average team
Good goalie; great team
Good goalie; good team
Good goalie; average team
Average goalie; great team
Average goalie; good team
Below-average goale; great team

And, of course, they would all be mixed up.....so it could be good goalie on great team at #1, etc.

So, it's just a big mixture....and it's always like this, and you might only have 3 of the 10 best goalies in the top-10 Save Percentage leaders.

So, even over many years, if an average (or a little above) goalie played for a consistently very strong team, they can be at or near the top for a long time.
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Save Percentage and goalie quality is certainly not an inverse relationship because goalie performance is a significant part of Save Percentage....but all the other factors are also a significant part, and that's why they don't match.
 
im not seeing it, at all

GAA is a total team defence stat

Save % is affected in the same way that goals and assists are affected by teammates.

You guys keep using one game examples, which is silly because it would be like me saying Darryl Sittler isnt the best player ever.

The only TRULY personal stats are blocked shots, hits, fights, takeaways.

save % is less affected by team than GAA is. A goalie has even less control over Wins as that also includes offence which he has little to zero affect on.

GAA is how many shots you allow, quality of shots and goalie performance on those shots

save percentage is quality of shots and goalie performance on those shots.

and it has to be viewed over a long period, obviously.
 
So, just to pull an example...how does one explain Brian Elliott in St. Louis vs everywhere else? https://www.hockey-reference.com/players/e/elliobr01.html
good example

again, i think we all know its a team-affected stat, just like pulling up Rob Brown‘s numbers wouldnt make us need to call goals and assists garbage.

Elliot’s GAA is even more dramatically different here, as it is more of a team stat.

And, we are still dealing with a smallish sample size (if we sre talking about the giant .940) His overall time in St Louis is a 9.25, this might even be a good ballpark estimate of how MUCH a team can affect the stat, as he goes back down to a .905ish for the rest of his career.

Nobody is saying that save% is the batting % of goalies, only that it is less team affected than wins, shutouts or GAA.

There really arent many stats in hockey that can really isolate a players performance like stats can in baseball. A lot of guys on here do a pretty good job of trying to contextualize with math, and then a lot of guys go back to the very, very subjective eye test.

I guess thats why the arguments never end. 😊
 
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You at least have "watch the games" credibility, which is relatively unique among our regulars (although Kahneman does a good job showing that experts are just as susceptible to behavioral economics-based biases as anyone).

Part of the problem is that HFBoards has followed the general societal trend of "nuance = weakness", and if you don't take a strong stand on one side of the aisle or the other, you're wishy-washy and ineffectual.

Save percentage certainly has flaws. Anyone who's relying on any single thing (or even any finite combination of things) without acknowledging that flaws exist (and ideally trying to enumerate those flaws) deserves what they get, and this includes the "I only have to watch the games" folks.
 
I remember as a Pens fan when we got Vokoun and he took the net from Fleury in 2013 playoffs. He was soooo good even at an old age. History will wrongly remember Fleury as better because of rings and wins but I hope that Vokoun doesn't get forgotten completely, what a great goalie.
 
Goalie stops 18 of 19 - save pct. = .947 (god tier)
Goalie stops 18 of 20 - save pct. = .900 (horrendous, apparently)
I am not sure if you are serious here, I imagine not you are making a 50-50% sarcastic joke but for a serious point here

Goalies stops 1800 of 1900 shots
vs
Goalies stops 1800 of 2000 shots

Yes really big difference of 100 more goals against a team at the end of the year, for a small workload change.

Save % is impacted more by the # of shots faced than goals allowed. For a simple example:

A goalie with a 3.00 GAA against 40 shots per game has a .925 sv%

A goalie with a 2.00 GAA against 20 shots per game has a .900 sv%
In that demonstration, you doubled the shots but augmented the goals by just 50%.

So, just to pull an example...how does one explain Brian Elliott in St. Louis vs everywhere else? https://www.hockey-reference.com/players/e/elliobr01.html

I think Hitchcock-Claude Julien teams can achieve to have an significant effect, would it be a bigger one than a winger playing with peak McDavid-Crosby (let alone Lemieux-Gretzky back in the days) or a defenceman having the chance to play on the first PP units on the side of Markov versus no power play time ?

But most goaltenders will be on the vast majority of very similar teams in that regard, bell curve. Like most first lines-first pp Units offense players, yse a bunch of outlier situation, but most are close enough that people do look at points over big enough sample size has a proxy of offensive talent and output.

Do people reject points-goals to nearly the same extend because of that ? Goaltender outlier season do not seem different than Pat Maroon goal scoring in 2017 or Colby Amstrong being almost a ppg in his rookie season than out of the league by 30.

If your issue is that everyone take Warren Young or Pat Maroon goal scoring into the context of being advantaged versus many better goalscorer that were in a different situation more than people take Julien Bruins goaltender or Hitchcock teams goaltenders save percentage into context, that would be true I think, maybe not during the time it happened but over time has the context disappear more than playing with a legendary player line.
 
just an opinion on the OP -

the 06 era and the… roughly 21st century has, imo, featured far greater parity in goaltending, or depth of good goalies. The 06 you were essentially competing at this stat vs 5 good goalies, and recently there just are many good goalies, nearly all with a proper d in front of them.

It isnt a shock that the goalies who really, really stand out here played between 1970-2000.
 
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Goalies seem to be so up and down now that I don't know how anyone can reliably evaluate them stats or no stats. Don't buy the parity argument at all. Different areas are the trendy hotbed of goaltending talent every few years now, too.

Saw an interview where Vasilevsky brought up how inconcistent goalies have been and how his big goal was to be good over a long career.. so it isn't even just us fans at home that have noticed it.
 
Yet, only goaltender that have been considered among if not the best of their generation achieved to sustain the best run at that statistics over a significant period of time ? Which is maybe a circular argument has like you said with so many people thinking it is some proxy for quality of goaltending it influenced that people thought of Roy-Luongo-Hasek-Dryden-Plante-Lundqvist-Smith-Hall-Bower-Parent-Esposito has being some of the best.
Yes, of course....if you're using Save Percentage to tell you who the best goaltenders are, then obviously the guys you think are the best are going to be those with the best Save Percentages. There aren't any other possibilities, right?

As I said above, when you look at a list of Save Percentage leaders, it is always a mishmash, which is due to the significant influences of both the goaltender and the rest of the team (and the other team). And, therefore, the leaders will not have all the best goalies, but rather some top goalies, some good goalies, some average goalies, and occasionally a below-average goalie (of course, the average and below-average goalies in the leaders will generally be playing for strong defensive teams).

Over longer periods of time, the below-average goalies will have trouble staying on the list. But the list will never tell you who the best goalies are. If you take 2 roughly equal goaltenders and one plays his career on a consistently strong defensive team (that generally gives up much fewer scoring chances than other teams), and the other on a weaker defensive team, their Save Percentages will be substantially different even though they performed the same.

Guys like Bower, Dryden, Smith, and Roy played for some extremely strong defensive teams....and obviously their Save Percentages would have been a lot lower if they didn't, even if they performed exactly the same personally. Dryden would never have been among the Save Percentage leaders if he had played for one of those terrible '70s teams.
 
just an opinion on the OP -

the 06 era and the… roughly 21st century has, imo, featured far greater parity in goaltending, or depth of good goalies. The 06 you were essentially competing at this stat vs 5 good goalies, and recently there just are many good goalies, nearly all with a proper d in front of them.

It isnt a shock that the goalies who really, really stand out here played between 1970-2000.
Most of what you are referring to here is not about the goaltenders, and I assume the reason you think it's about the goaltenders is because you're looking at it from the lens of Save Percentage being a goaltending statistic, which it really isn't.

The goalies in the '70s and '80s stand out because there were a smaller number of teams who knew how to play defense - I'm referring, here, to the forwards and the defensemen. This is primarily due to coaching. So, Philly, Montreal, and the Islanders were especially strong defensively and well-coached, and a few other teams were decent, and then some poor defensive teams. Some teams just didn't know how to play defense, and there was no chance a goalie on these teams would have a good Save Percentage.

But, on the top teams, bingo, a goalie had it pretty easy. Those few top teams dominated Save Percentage for a very long time, whoever was playing net.

Today, everybody knows how to play defense, so it's a lot different environment, even though there are still significant differences in team defense, from team to team.

But the non-goalie contribution to Save Percentage is always there, and it's always substantial, whether positive or negative.
 
As I said above, when you look at a list of Save Percentage leaders, it is always a mishmash
Not much over a significant amount of time too right, has shown in the first post.
Over longer periods of time, the below-average goalies will have trouble staying on the list. But the list will never tell you who the best goalies are
Which I am not sure is the debate I wanted, do you think it less informative about who the best goalies are than points inform us in an Adam Oates vs Hull or Yzerman debate or Phil Housley versus Raymond Bourque ?

No one is arguing that you can list goaltender by a mix of volume and saved percentage in giant sample size and have a perfect list, but that the list would be by far the best ranking one of any statistics available in hockey, which statistics do you not consider would be better at blindly ranking players ?

But the non-goalie contribution to Save Percentage is always there, and it's always substantial, whether positive or negative.
I suspect like most (all ?) study like this it is quite small among most team has a different, a lot of defence can be via reducing shots against, not quality and lot of teams will be middle of the pack at both.

Yes, of course....if you're using Save Percentage to tell you who the best goaltenders are, then obviously the guys you think are the best are going to be those with the best Save Percentages. There aren't any other possibilities, right?
Save percentage was not that popular if I am not mistaken by many that classed the Plante to say, until Hasek.
 
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Dryden would never have been among the Save Percentage leaders if he had played for one of those terrible '70s teams.
Maybe but from 71-7 to 76-77, Montreal when Dryden was in Net had a save percentage of .922 and .899 when he was not, the same has the league average goaltending of that time period of .892

And a guy like Micheal Plasse save percentage was the same with Kansas city and the penguins after leaving Montreal superteam.
 
Like literally every hockey statistic, save percentage needs context to be meaningful. But also like most statistics, it does tell us many interesting things.

Let's look at the great Dominik Hašek vs. the other goalies the Buffalo Sabres used, during the six seasons in a row (!) Hašek led the NHL in save percentage:

Six seasons of Hašek:
.930
The same six seasons of other Sabres' goalies (Fuhr, Stauber, Trefilov, Blue, Shields, Biron, Roloson):
.897

I'm not a statistical expert, but I think this is a pretty clear case of save percentage by itself telling us some very useful things -- the more so when you consider that, presumably, the back-up goalies in this period generally faced the weaker NHL teams as opponents, while Hašek faced the stronger clubs.
 
Given those names and sample sizes in given seasons, is comparing some non-NHL goalies (in some cases) to maybe the best ever, any better than looking at save pct. leaders in the playoffs and their results...?

2022 - Oettinger . 954 - lost round 1
2021 - Vasilevskiy .937 - Won Cup
2020 - Korpisalo .941 - lost round 1
2019 - Lehner .936 - swept in round 2

2018 - M.Jones .928 - lost round 2
2017 - M.Murray .937 - Won Cup (playing a series and a half)
2016 - Andersen .947 - lost round 1
2015 - Holtby .944 - lost round 2
2014 - S.Mason .939 - lost round 1

Five of the last 9 goalies that led the playoffs in save pct. didn't win any games after round 1.
 
any better than looking at save pct. leaders in the playoffs and their results...?
It seem trivial yes, the bigger the sample size the more telling.

Just looking at Lehner its save percentage in the playoff round he lost was .907, the round he won .956, what are we to think about a 8 game sample size ?

Five of the last 9 goalies that led the playoffs in save pct. didn't win any games after round 1.
Yes those playing a very small numbers of game will have giant noise (low and high) and will often lead both category of the worst and best save percentage I imagine, same will be if we would look at the PDO extreme of shot percentage extreme, more in players with 4-5 games than those with 22.

Do the same with point per game or goal per game instead of save percentage, it would not be surprising to see players with a smaller amount of game and being in the 75% of players out by round more often lead the league than those that win the cups, what would it tell us about scoring goals ?

Since 2005-2006:

The top 14 best goal per games in the playoff are from people that did not went out of the first round, what should we think of scoring goals because of that ? McDavid scored 2.25 pts per game in 19-20 and was out in 4 !
 
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Most of what you are referring to here is not about the goaltenders, and I assume the reason you think it's about the goaltenders is because you're looking at it from the lens of Save Percentage being a goaltending statistic, which it really isn't.

The goalies in the '70s and '80s stand out because there were a smaller number of teams who knew how to play defense - I'm referring, here, to the forwards and the defensemen. This is primarily due to coaching. So, Philly, Montreal, and the Islanders were especially strong defensively and well-coached, and a few other teams were decent, and then some poor defensive teams. Some teams just didn't know how to play defense, and there was no chance a goalie on these teams would have a good Save Percentage.

But, on the top teams, bingo, a goalie had it pretty easy. Those few top teams dominated Save Percentage for a very long time, whoever was playing net.

Today, everybody knows how to play defense, so it's a lot different environment, even though there are still significant differences in team defense, from team to team.

But the non-goalie contribution to Save Percentage is always there, and it's always substantial, whether positive or negative.
i even mentioned having proper d in front of the 21st century goalies.
 

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