BigBadBruins7708
Registered User
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%