Pre-Lockout Chris Osgood Was Not Clutch

"I always loved the fact that when we were tied or the games were close in the last 10 minutes, I'd shut the door and we'd win the game," he said.

"I knew how I did my job on a great team." (Chris Osgood)

I figure that after a long silence in this space, it would only be fitting to get back into it with one of my favourite topics: the overratedness of Chris Osgood.

Actually, to be honest, I wish I didn't have to make posts like these. The recently-retired Osgood should be remembered as a guy who overcame all kinds of obstacles and worked hard to outlast a ton of other goalies who may have had more natural talent. I thought this was a terrific read that showed Osgood's dedication in rebuilding his game to incorporate modern techniques. I get why Detroit fans loved their scrappy netminder, it's great that fan bases identify with blue collar guys who give it everything they have out on the ice.

But, unfortunately, most people still can't separate individual play from team success. In their eyes, 400 wins and 3 Cups make you a Hall of Famer, no further analysis required. They portray Osgood as something that he simply never was, and that's not fair. Ergo, as long as there are specious and silly arguments being thrown out in his favour by people with influence within the hockey community, then I'm going to keep making posts to set the record straight. Sorry, Ozzy, it's nothing personal, I just believe that credit should go where credit is due.

One of the points I have repeatedly tried to make regarding Chris Osgood is that even if you think he was a supreme clutch performer in the 2008 and 2009 playoff runs, that should still not have any impact at all on how you rate his playoff performances from earlier in his career. Many fans seem to have a tendency to revise their evaluations of a player based on their late-career performance, and that makes no sense.

I think Osgood got a lot of help in 2008 and a lot of favourable bounces in 2009, but I will still readily concede that it is much, much more supportable to assert that Ozzy was clutch in those two seasons than it is to claim that Osgood was clutch in the playoffs from 1994-2004.

It would in fact be far, far easier to make the case that Osgood was a spectacular choker in his early career than it would be to argue that he made the big saves when his team needed them most.

Here's the data to support that statement. I looked at Chris Osgood's playoff numbers in the third period based on the game score from 1994 to 2004 (source: Hockey Summary Project). Without play-by-play records to separate out the shots by score, I chose to measure Osgood's GAA in each situation:

Trailing by 2+: 1.02
Trailing by 1: 2.10
Score tied: 2.98
Leading by 1: 2.53
Leading by 2+: 1.88
Overtime: 3.18

The most high-leverage situations with the highest loss in win probability from allowing a goal against are when a team is tied or leading by one goal late in the game. It's hard to miss the observation that these precise situations are the ones where the other team was most likely to score on Osgood. Coincidentally, his goals against numbers dropped in situations where the penalty of a goal against was the lowest. That is not the expected profile of a goalie who was giving up goals when it didn't matter and slamming the door when the game was on the line.

Grouping the numbers into just two groups, the most high-leverage situations (tie game in third & OT and preserving a late one-goal lead) and then everything else, you get these numbers:

OT/tied/up by 1: 2.81

All other situations: 1.71

Of course his teammates playing to the score would have had an impact on those numbers, but did the Red Wings allow over 60% more shots against in the most pressure-packed situations? There's simply no way that was the case, which means that Osgood's individual numbers definitely dropped as the penalty for a goal against rose.

Assuming the shots were distributed evenly regardless of score, Osgood would have had an .881 save percentage with the score tied or his team leading by one, compared to a .924 save percentage the rest of the time. The one situation where it is possible to fully separate out Osgood's save percentage is overtime, where he let in 6 goals on 46 shots for a wholly unimpressive .870 save percentage.

In an attempt to better account for score effects I estimated the shot frequency for each score by taking the average shots in only third periods with more than 15 minutes played with that particular score, and then used those averages to adjust Osgood's expected shots based on his minutes played. The result was that Osgood's numbers got even worse in the most clutch situations, falling to .880, while his save percentage rose to .929 with his team either trailing or leading by 2 or more goals. Even if you want to go so far as to ignore that attempt and simply assume that the Wings allowed shots against at a 20% higher rate in the high leverage situations, the save percentage split would still be .901/.915.

All this is despite the fact that save percentages are higher on average for goalies in the lead than they are for goalies who are trailing, because trailing teams tend to put as many pucks on the net as possible. For example, in this post I show some playoff split numbers for five real elite goalies, who combined to put up a .930 save percentage in third periods that they entered leading by one, compared to a .918 save percentage in third periods they began with a one goal deficit. If you need further convincing, a recent Hockey Analysis post gives even strength numbers broken down by score that show how save percentages rise for the team in the lead.

I also recently developed an additional measure of a goalie's clutch play using the Hockey Summary Project box scores. It is an estimated game-tied save percentage, calculated by noting how much of each period was spent with the score tied, pro-rating the shots for each team during that period by that amount of time, and then noting how many tiebreaking goals were scored by each team. After compiling those figures for each playoff game, a save percentage can be calculated to estimate a goalie's save rate with the score deadlocked. Because of score effects it is not likely to be exact, but it should provide a reasonable estimate. Another benefit is that this measurement covers the entire game, rather than just the third period and OT.

From 1994 to 2004, Chris Osgood's estimated save percentage with the score tied was .890, which is right in line with the estimates from his GAA. That is a substantial drop from his overall pre-lockout playoff save percentage of .910, implying a .922 save percentage in situations where one team (usually his own) held a lead. In addition, it was estimated that only 28% of Osgood's shots against came with the score tied. The main reason that Osgood's teams usually won was that they heavily outshot the opposition in close games (estimated ratio of 1.25 to 1 with the score tied).

Small sample sizes are always a concern when looking at playoff stats, and even more so when the sample is broken down into smaller chunks based on game score. The entire third period and OT sample covers just 681 shots, and the estimated game-tied shots are even lower at 608, which does leave room for the possibility that Osgood was simply unlucky. The process of putting these numbers together is also based on tedious compiling, which raises at least the possibility of an error although I checked the numbers where I could.

At the very least, however, we should be able to claim that there is no evidence to suggest that Osgood improved his play when the pressure rose. On the contrary, the statistical record is very clear that the more desperately the other team needed to score, the more likely they were to slip one past Chris Osgood.

In 2008 and 2009, Osgood's numbers vastly improved in the same situations:

OT/tied/up by 1: 1.53

All other situations: 1.21

Yet again, however, Osgood's GAA was higher when the game was on the line and lower when the outcome was less in doubt, although the split is not as extreme as the one above. I'm not saying that to be critical of Osgood's performance, merely to argue against the claim he selectively raised his game in certain spots. His estimated game-tied save percentage was .933, which is slightly higher than his .928 overall, which could indicate that he was slightly better when the score was close. However, there remains little reason to suggest that Osgood made a significantly greater contribution to winning than his overall numbers indicate.

It remains possible to make a clutch argument for 2008 and 2009 based on the way Osgood's numbers improved from the regular season to the playoffs. I don't buy that it was a conscious thing that Osgood decided to just make himself play well once the puck dropped in the postseason, but the subjective and objective evidence does certainly support the claim that he played better from April to June than from October to March. Maybe Osgood learned how to be clutch, maybe he went on a hot streak, maybe he was just playing behind a dominant defensive team. Either way I don't think that is enough to make up for all the "big goals" Osgood allowed over the rest of his career.

I've stated before that I'm always skeptical of how subjective observers rate the clutch play of an athlete because they let other factors enter the picture, often unknowingly. This appears to be another example of that exact error. Detroit Red Wings fans, Osgood's teammates and even apparently Osgood himself all want to believe in the idea that their team's long-time netminder was clutch, that he made the key saves for the team, that his average numbers are misleading because he always came up big with the game on the line. The problem is that the evidence suggests it was probably just a misperception caused by selective memory and attributing things to Osgood that were more than likely primarily caused by other players on the team. If anything, Osgood appears to have been the opposite of clutch through the vast majority of his playoff career.