Adjusted Shutouts

In an earlier post, I calculated how well goalies did against league-adjusted save percentage. Some of the feedback from that post was that save percentage doesn't show everything. Fair enough, I will be looking at a couple of other traditional goalie statistics in a series of upcoming posts. With Martin Brodeur chasing down the career shutout record, I decided to focus first on shutout statistics. Anyone can look up the raw stats and see the all-time and active leaders, but as we have seen many times, dealing with unadjusted goalie stats is almost always a bad idea. As such, we need to add some context to the stats to be able to isolate who was actually outstanding and who was merely average or worse. I came up with two different ways of adjusting shutout totals. The first is adjusting shutouts for era, which is described in this post. The second, adjusting shutouts for the number of shots faced, will be described in a future post.

If you look at the career shutout ranking, you notice right away that shutouts are heavily impacted by era effects. The best periods for shutouts were the pre-World War II era, the 1950s, and the so-called "Dead Puck Era" (1997-2004). Goalies who played during these periods dominate the career list. The most difficult times to record shutouts were during World War II and the entire 1980s decade.

To take this into account, I have calculated an era-adjusted shutouts statistic, done by adjusting each goalie's number of shutouts based on the league average frequency of shutouts on a season-by-season basis. If shutouts were common around the league that season then each one received less of a weighting, but if shutouts were scarce goalies received bonus points for each one they recorded.

Here are the top 25 goalies of all-time in adjusted shutouts, from 1917-18 through 2007-08. I have included total shutouts, adjusted shutouts, as well as adjusted shutouts per 1000 games played to compare goalies with different career lengths.

Rank	Goalie	SO	Adj SO	AdjSO/1000 GP
1.	Clint Benedict	57	107.7	297.5
2.	Martin Brodeur	96	94.7	97.8
3.	Tony Esposito	76	94.0	106.1
4.	Ed Belfour	76	89.7	93.1
5.	Terry Sawchuk	103	87.8	90.4
6.	Patrick Roy	66	87.4	84.9
7.	Glenn Hall	84	84.9	93.7
8.	Dominik Hasek	81	83.8	114.0
9.	Jacques Plante	82	80.9	96.7
10.	Turk Broda	62	70.3	111.8
11.	Tiny Thompson	81	68.3	123.5
12.	Mike Liut	25	64.6	97.3
13.	George Hainsworth	94	64.5	138.7
14.	Harry Lumley	71	63.6	79.2
15.	Rogie Vachon	51	63.2	79.5
16.	Bernie Parent	54	62.3	102.5
17.	Tom Barrasso	38	61.9	79.7
18.	Alec Connell	81	61.3	147.0
19.	John Vanbiesbrouck	40	59.1	67.0
20.	Ed Giacomin	54	58.5	96.1
21.	Ken Dryden	46	55.9	140.8
22.	Lorne Chabot	71	55.1	133.7
23.	Curtis Joseph	51	50.9	55.2
24.	Andy Moog	28	49.6	69.6
25.	Frank Brimsek	40	49.5	96.3

Martin Brodeur does well by this metric, hanging onto the same #2 spot he holds in actual career shutouts. Tony Esposito, Ed Belfour and Patrick Roy move up the adjusted rankings while Terry Sawchuk and George Hainsworth drop down. Clint Benedict is the new leader, but his adjusted shutouts per game rate makes it obvious that his numbers are somewhat inflated. For most of his career he had the advantage of playing on the best team in a 4 team league, which makes it much easier to beat the average. Benedict has a good shutout record, but I'm not sure it is quite that good.

Probably the most interesting result on the list is Mike Liut, who had only 25 career shutouts but ends up 12th all-time in adjusted total. Over the course of Liut's career, his adjusted shutout per games mark has been virtually equivalent to Martin Brodeur's. Other goalies who suffered from playing in the wide-open 1980s but still posted very strong shutout totals include Tom Barrasso, John Vanbiesbrouck, and Andy Moog.