The Stanley Cup Might Depend on Which Underperforming Goalie Steps Up
Many contenders head into the playoffs with netminders coming off underwhelming seasons.
As we close in on the end of the NHL regular season, most of the playoff teams — though not all — are already locked in, even if the first-round matchups are still subject to change. That means we have a good idea of who the main players will be as the Stanley Cup drama unfolds over the next few months. But how much do we really know what will make or break those teams’ title chances?
This year’s playoffs look extremely wide-open, with 11 different teams carrying at least a 5% chance of winning the Cup according to my meta-forecast model.1 And one of the great unknowns fueling that uncertainty: Goaltending. Many of the teams with championship aspirations go into the playoffs with netminders who are coming off disappointing campaigns, but who clearly have the potential to play well enough in the postseason to carry a Stanley Cup run.
One of my favorite concepts that I often steal from the world of baseball analysis is the idea of a player’s “established level” of performance: Using a weighted average of the player’s previous three seasons to set the expectations for what he might produce during the season in question.2 While it doesn’t account for factors such as aging curves, it provides a solid answer to the question of who is living up to their previous track record, and who is falling short.
In hockey, the players who over- or under-perform the most relative to their established Goals Above Replacement (GAR) levels are typically goalies, since their performances are notoriously prone to fluctuating from year to year. But even with that in mind, this season features a high number of goalies on contending teams who are coming off comparatively down years. As of Sunday morning, here are the 2023-24 “leaders” in falling short of established GAR among players on teams with at least a 50% chance of making the playoffs and an established level of at least 10.0 GAR:
A player can undershoot his established level for many reasons, not the least of which being injuries. But whatever the cause, 8 of the Top 10 players on the list above are goalies who either are solidly their team’s playoff starter, or — in the cases of Ilya Samsonov and Linus Ullmark — will get a chance to at least start some playoff games over their younger teammates in net (Joseph Woll and Jeremy Swayman, respectively) depending how the postseason goes.
Toss Edmonton’s Stuart Skinner — who didn’t have a bad season, but who wasn’t quite as sharp as he was last year— into the mix as well, and 9 of the 15 teams with the highest Cup odds are relying on goalies whose mix of a solid track record and a down 2023-24 season makes them complete wild cards for the playoffs.
(That group doesn’t even include a team like the Carolina Hurricanes — the Stanley Cup favorites right now — whose mediocre goaltending for the majority of the season was somewhat predictable based on last year, but who certainly could transcend their unspectacular regular-season GAR ranking with Frederik Andersen playing so well recently.)
It might be easier to just list off the starters for top contenders who actually met or exceeded expectations this season: Florida’s Sergei Bobrovsky (+9.9 versus established); Vancouver’s Thatcher Demko (+7.3) — provided he is healthy; Winnipeg’s Connor Hellebuyck (+5.7); Vegas’ Adin Hill (+3.8) — provided he is actually their starter; and either of Los Angeles’ two options, Cam Talbot (+12.3) or David Rittich (+8.9).
Is it a bigger advantage to be on that list or our earlier one? Logic might dictate that you’d rather have a goalie who actually has played well this season, carrying the team to contention by silencing any doubts about his performance level. But I’m not so sure you wouldn’t not want the first list instead, based both on the names there — it’s hard to find a more dominant playoff goalie than Vasilevskiy over the past decade — and the fact that a great regular season between the pipes is far from a guarantee of playoff success. To quote myself from a story I wrote 10 years ago:
“Just as we found the correlation for regular-season GA%- to be quite low from year to year, the correlation between a goalie’s regular-season and his playoff GA%- is even smaller, as is the correlation between his previous career GA%- and playoff GA%-. We can’t predict who will fluctuate, just that somebody likely will.”
And in these playoffs more than most, those fluctuations might end up determining who hoists the Cup when all is said and done.
We’ll round the defending champ Vegas Golden Knights up to 5%.
The exact formula for established level in any statistic is the maximum of either: (3*(last year’s stat) + 2*(stat 2 years ago) + 1*(stat 3 years ago))/6, or (3/4)*(last year’s stat).