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.

What's Going on Out West?

So far in the Stanley Cup playoffs, there has been a pretty stark contrast in goalie numbers between the two Conferences.

Eastern Conference: 2.04 GAA, .931 save %
Western Conference: 3.26 GAA, .893 save %

If you rank the starters in order of save percentage, here's the breakdown based on their conference:

1. East
2. East
3. East
4. East
5. East
6. East
7. West
8. East
9. West
10. East
11. West
12. West
13. West
14. West
15. West
16. West

Even more surprisingly, the top 3 goalies out West in save percentage thus far are Corey Crawford, Ray Emery and Jimmy Howard. The big name puckstoppers (Luongo, Bryzgalov, Rinne, Quick, Niemi) have been absolutely lit up to the tune of a combined 3.77/.880.

I'm not sure if this can be attributed to poor goalie play or a more wide-open style of play or just standard variance over a 1,000 shot sample. There have been some softies, but there have been also been a lot of shooters making their shots as well.

The argument can be made that the Eastern goalies as a group are slightly better, but I don't really see the gap as being all the large. During the regular season, the Eastern playoff starters combined for a .9209 save percentage while the Western starters were at .9205.

It seems inevitable that the tide will eventually turn for the Western netminders (and defensive units), but it has certainly made for an unusually high-scoring first round of the playoffs.

Goalie Point Shares

Hockey Reference introduced a new point shares metric recently. Is it a valuable stat that sheds more light on historical goalie performance?

Let's look at the all-time top 20 list:

1. Patrick Roy
2. Martin Brodeur
3. Terry Sawchuk
4. Tony Esposito
5. Glenn Hall
6. Jacques Plante
7. Curtis Joseph
8. Ed Belfour
9. Dominik Hasek
10. John Vanbiesbrouck
11. Roberto Luongo
12. Rogie Vachon
13. Sean Burke
14. Harry Lumley
15. Gump Worsley
16. Tomas Vokoun
17. Grant Fuhr
18. Tom Barrasso
19. Bernie Parent
20. Billy Smith

I conclude pretty confidently that the above list doesn't come close to passing the common sense test, as it deviates significantly from virtually every other ranking method out there. There's lots that I could nitpick, but I'll just point out that I don't think I've ever seen any other career list, statistical or subjective, that had Joseph, Belfour and Hasek ranked in that order.

It looks like the percentage of credit given to the goalies for team results is too high, and longevity has an excessive impact on the rankings. I probably rate Sean Burke higher than most, especially for his work in the second half of his career, but he still shouldn't be anywhere close to 13th all-time. In fact, given that Burke ranks 12th in career games played, he's a pretty good test case to see whether you are evaluating a goalie's actual performance or just giving them points for showing up for work. I can't help but conclude that Goalie Point Shares does far too much of the latter.

If you're looking for a one stat representation of a goalie's career, I'd still recommend sticking to era-adjusted save percentage or GVT.

Longevity

Here are some career games played numbers, counting all games played in the regular season and playoffs in the NHL, all games played in a major European professional league and all games played in senior international competitions:

1. Dominik Hasek: 1,358
2. Martin Brodeur: 1,325
3. Patrick Roy: 1,282
4. Ed Belfour: 1,153
5. Curtis Joseph: 1,092

Brodeur and Roy have been rightly praised for their excellent longevity, but it's the guy at the top of the list that might surprise some NHL fans.

Hasek was the youngest professional hockey player ever as a 16 year old in the Czech League, and he led the KHL in shutouts this season three decades later at the age of 46. To put that into perspective, Gordie Howe's professional career spanned 34 years, just 4 more than Hasek's to date.

Hasek ranks 5th all-time among NHL players in career GVT, even though just 63% of his professional games were played in the NHL. Give him credit for those European games (the vast majority of which were played while Hasek was good enough to play in the NHL but prevented from doing so by communism), and there's probably a good argument to rank him no worse than 3rd behind only Howe and Wayne Gretzky for the highest total value career ever.

Get 'Em While They're Hot

Through December 31, Antti Niemi had a career save percentage of .907 on his first 2,197 shots faced in the NHL, including his playoff run with Chicago. That's not enough to even cover league average, which has been north of .910 for the last couple of seasons. Given that Niemi is an undrafted free agent who has never stood out from the pack in any professional league has played in, that doesn't seem to indicate much of a future as an NHL starting goalie.

In the 2011 calendar year, though, things have turned around for the Finnish netminder. Niemi has stopped 670 of 716 shots for a .936 save percentage since January 1. The result is that the Sharks recently signed him to a 4 year, $15.2 million deal.

Chicago wasn't willing to pay Niemi $2.75 million for just one season, yet San Jose apparently thinks he's worth a million bucks more than that for each of the next four years. This is also after the Sharks signed Niemi for $2 million during the offseason, and after Niemi struggled early on. Two bad months + two good months = roughly two times the paycheque? Both the term and the money make that a pretty baffling move from San Jose's perspective. Perhaps they're so desperate to finally win something in the playoffs that they're willing to overpay anybody with a Stanley Cup ring on his finger.

To quote Gabe Desjardins in a comment written as a follow-up to his terrific post on a goalie's first 15 NHL games:

"The main point here is that you need 2000+ shots to make a decision about a goalie…And that to get a 2000-shot tryout, you’re best off hitting a performance high in your first few hundred shots…"

Niemi did it backwards. He got his 2000 shot tryout, and he couldn't even manage to be league average despite playing on strong teams the entire time. Then he hit a performance high in his next 700 shots and cashed in. The result is that he'll have a higher cap hit next season than either Pekka Rinne or Kari Lehtonen.

Rinne, Lehtonen and Niemi are all Finnish starting goalies, but I'd still maintain that one of them is not like the others. Whether it was a result of falling in love with his recent form or overrating his playoff team success, San Jose appears to have made a pretty bad bet with the Niemi contract.

The Between the Lockouts Cohort

A look at goalie Hall of Famers listed by birthday reveals a repeated clustering effect, as I pointed out in my last post. I want to take a more detailed look at one group that seems to have been particularly disadvantaged by environmental factors in terms of their Hall of Fame chances, the group of goalies that entered the NHL during the Dead Puck Era (which has been given differing endpoints by different people, but for now I'll use the period between the lockouts as a convenient definition).

On the surface, breaking into the NHL at a time when scoring was low seems to be a great opportunity for a goalie to put up some great numbers. However, this "between the lockouts cohort" was a group of goalies that faced increased competition from a larger talent pool, consisting of both better North American athletes choosing to play goal as well as a new influx of talent from Europe, making it much more difficult to stand out from the pack. They also had to deal with a quartet of first-ballot Hall of Famers that not only dominated the league's awards, but also hogged the starting jobs on the league best teams for much of the pre-lockout period.

Once those greats faded off into the sunset, and the new crop began looking for their own shot at backstopping a contending team to glory, the salary cap changed the way great teams were built. Instead of bringing in a hired gun veteran All-Star netminder to complete a championship team, as every Cup winning team did between the lockouts other than the Devils and the '98 Red Wings, many of the league's best teams have decided to invest their precious payroll dollars in maintaining depth in their group of skaters rather than spending big money on the goaltending position, or have decided to develop goalies internally rather than take the risk of shelling out big money on the free agent market.

As a result, a fairly mediocre collection of goalies have won the Cup since the lockout, while many of the league's most tenured netminders currently ply their trades for non-contending teams. Once again, the universe seems to have stacked the deck against the between the lockouts group.

The overall result was that this group did not win much individual award recognition or experience much team success, increasing the chances that few of them will be remembered long after their careers come to an end.

To be considered part of the group that I'm talking about, a goalie's first season as a starter has to have come between 1994-95 and 2003-04 inclusive. Since 2005 there have been a number of goalies with promising starts to their career who could attract Hall of Fame attention, either because of their play/awards recognition (e.g. Lundqvist, Thomas, Miller) or playoff success (e.g. Ward, Fleury).

Between the Lockouts Goalies, Sorted by Career Games Played:

Goalie	GP	W	SO	Sv%	PO W	PO SO	PO SV%
Nikolai Khabibulin	730	314	43	.908	39	6	.917
Roberto Luongo	653	296	54	.919	17	1	.919
Tomas Vokoun	615	258	43	.917	3	1	.922
Jose Theodore	567	254	30	.909	19	1	.911
Evgeni Nabokov	563	293	50	.912	40	7	.913
Dwayne Roloson	545	204	28	.910	18	1	.915
Marty Turco	536	273	41	.910	21	4	.914
Tommy Salo	526	210	37	.905	5	0	.909
J.S. Giguere	518	231	34	.913	33	6	.925
Miikka Kiprusoff	505	263	37	.913	25	6	.921

These ten goalies have combined for just 2 Stanley Cup rings and 2 Vezinas, with none of them managing to win both. Not only does the group have only two Vezinas, but it came awfully close to not having any at all. Jose Theodore tied Patrick Roy with 105 points in the 2002 voting, winning only via the first place votes tiebreaker. If just one of the GMs with Theodore first and Roy second had switched their vote, Roy would have taken home that award. As if to reinforce the narrowness of Theodore's victory, the Habs netminder lost out on the First Team All-Star honour to Roy.

As for Kiprusoff's Vezina in 2006, here are his stats up until the Olympic break compared to Dominik Hasek's:

Kiprusoff: 29-14-7, 2.23, .915, 6 SO
Hasek: 28-10-4, 2.09, .925, 5 SO

At that point in the season Hasek may have had the edge, despite playing for a stronger team, but then he went and pulled his groin at the Olympics and left the door open for Kiprusoff to run away with it. Kipper did have a fantastic second half that year, and may have won regardless, but I think it's safe to say that without the injury Hasek would have been a strong contender for the 2006 Vezina.

On the other hand, I think this group lost out on several awards that it rightfully should have won, including Turco in 2003 and Luongo in both 2004 and 2007. But with respect to what did happen, it's not too hard to envision a scenario where they would have been completely shut out.

Khabibulin and Giguere are the only goalies in the group with Cup rings. Those two as well as Kiprusoff and Roloson are likely considered by many to be good playoff goalies based on all of them having a signature deep postseason run to their credit. However, if you look at their playoff careers other than that one year none of them have a distinguished record of success, except for Giguere, who won the Cup and Conn Smythe in separate postseasons.

Yet even Giguere has had his share of bad games and more than a typical share of being relegated to the backup role by a teammate. Without '03, Giguere is 18-11 but with a pedestrian .907 save percentage in the playoffs. Without their runs in '04 Khabibulin is 23-24, .911 and Kiprusoff is 10-17, .915, and without '06 Roloson is 6-7, .892.

Evgeni Nabokov has had some postseason opportunities on strong teams, but although he leads this group in playoff wins he is considered by many to be a playoff disappointment. I'm not sure it's really fair to suggest Nabokov didn't play up to his usual standards in the playoffs. I doubt he performed all that differently, the main difference was likely that the higher level of postseason opposition removed much of the team advantages that helped boost his traditional stats in the regular season.

Nabokov is the only one of these goalies that has repeatedly started in the playoffs on legitimate Stanley Cup contenders. Giguere and Khabibulin had great teams when they won but not too much help outside of that. Turco played for a couple of very strong teams in Dallas and Nashville was a really good team in 2007 with Vokoun, although it was never easy to make it through the tough Western Conference. Other than that, there haven't been many teams with any of these goalies in net that would have been found among the Stanley Cup odds leaders on the eve of the playoffs. Luongo, Roloson and Vokoun have all missed the playoffs far more often than they have made it, despite strong regular season play. All 10 have a playoff save percentage as high or higher than their regular season mark. The cause of the general lack of playoff team success seems to be primarily the result of a lack of support, rather than poor clutch performance by these goalies as a group.

With Nabokov's attempted move to Detroit blocked by Garth Snow and Turco relegated to the bench in Chicago, the only goalies from this group that appear to be in a good position to make some playoff noise this spring are Luongo and Roloson. Because of his age and the strong group of teammates around him, Luongo has a great chance to add to his playoff portfolio over the next 5 seasons. It seems unlikely that any of the others will be in a similar position, although of course deadline deals or free agency could significantly alter their prospects.

Right now, I don't think any of the between the lockout group are sure Hall of Famers. I think Luongo is very much on track to get there some day, and would be close to a sure thing already if he was fairly evaluated for his performance in Florida or if there wasn't such a focus on team success for goalies. Other than that I'm not sure anyone else will come close.

The top contenders either have the individual hardware but lack the career totals (Giguere, Kiprusoff, Theodore), or have the career numbers but lack the awards (Luongo, Vokoun, Nabokov, Khabibulin). In another time and place, most of these goalies might well have racked up lots of hardware and wins and team success and fame and "money goalie" accolades. Yet with the hand they were dealt, most of them appear fated to be remembered as little more than good goalies that played in the shadows of Hall of Famers.

Hall of Famers Come In Fours

Looking through the list of goalies in the Hall of Fame sorted by birthday, there seems to be a repeating pattern. Several goalies will be inducted that were all born over a short time period. That will be followed by an extended dry spell, before another cluster of similarly-aged candidates gets enshrined. This is followed by another gap, and the cycle repeats.

This doesn't particularly apply to the oldest goalies in the Hall of Fame (Hugh Lehman, Georges Vezina, Hap Holmes, Clint Benedict and George Hainsworth), all of whom were born between 1885 and 1895. Then again, things were quite different back then in hockey's early days, with several different professional leagues, teams folding and moving all the time, and some goalies having very atypical career curves, often playing many years of amateur hockey before breaking into the professional at an advanced age.

The first group of Hall of Fame goalies who spent the large majority of their careers in the National Hockey League were born around the turn of the 20th century: Roy Worters (1900), Alec Connell (1902), Tiny Thompson (1903), and Charlie Gardiner (1904). After those four, it took a decade to produce the next Hall of Famer (Turk Broda in 1914).

Broda was quickly followed by Brimsek the following year and Bill Durnan the year after that to create the trio of goaltending legends that dominated the NHL in the 1940s. In the decade after Durnan, Chuck Rayner (1920), Johnny Bower (1924) and Harry Lumley (1926) were born. Lumley and especially Bower made most of their Hall of Fame cases after the previous "Big Three" had retired.

Perhaps the best goalie cohort of all was the 1929-1931 group, which includes Terry Sawchuk, Jacques Plante, Gump Worsley and Glenn Hall. In the wake of that dominating quartet there was a gap of eight years until the next Hall of Famer, and even then the next two inductees born (Ed Giacomin in 1939 and Gerry Cheevers in 1940) are both among the weakest goalies enshrined, with Hall of Fame cases largely built on taking advantage of an unbalanced league.

It took 12 years after Hall until the next no-doubt first-ballot Hall of Fame netminder came into the world in the person of Tony Esposito in 1943. Once again, he was quickly followed by a couple of others: Bernie Parent in 1945 and Ken Dryden in 1947, with Billy Smith arriving not far behind in 1950.

The next decade (1951 to 1961) didn't see any goaltenders born who would eventually be considered Hall of Famers, and that is probably not likely to change either with the games played leaders from that period including Mike Liut, Greg Millen, Andy Moog, Kelly Hrudey and Don Beaupre.

With 1962 came Grant Fuhr to break the drought, but 1965 was the real money year for goaltending ability, producing three first-ballot Hall of Famers in Dominik Hasek, Patrick Roy and Ed Belfour. All goalies born in 1965 combined to play a 4,687 games in the NHL, well ahead of any other year on record, and Tom Barrasso may still have an outside chance at making it four Hall of Famers from one birth year.

Yet again the feast and famine pattern looks like it will continue, with Curtis Joseph the only goalie born from 1966 to 1971 that is likely to be even seriously discussed by the Hall of Fame committee, and although some goalies have significant portions of their careers remaining the only guaranteed Hall of Famer born since 1971 remains Martin Brodeur.

What is causing all this? Is it merely that the random allotment of goaltending ability just happened to result in some groupings close together? That's likely part of it, but it's not particularly probable that a similar pattern would have repeated itself essentially four times in a row.

Factors that may have had some impact are the level of league scoring, the size and level of parity in the league, and changing league rules or revolutions in goalie training or techniques. Certain periods seemed to be set up better than others to create Hall of Famers, either because lower scoring levels led to lower GAAs and higher shutout totals or because an unbalanced league made it easier to rack up wins on the top teams.

Beyond that, it seems apparent that opportunity would have played a significant role, especially in smaller leagues with only 6 or 12 starting jobs available. In reality it was likely even more restrictive than that, given the required level of team success typically needed to produce a Hall of Fame career. With two or three teams dominating the standings year after year throughout much of the NHL's history, goalies usually either had to be fortunate enough to be signed by those elite clubs, or else they had to play well enough for long enough on one of the league's bottom-feeders that they were eventually given the chance to don the sweater of a Cup contender.

I'd say that the most likely explanation is that a few elite goalies have a tendency to monopolize awards and gravitate towards the best starting jobs in the league, making it that much harder for the guys coming after them to put together the trophy case and team success that the Hall of Fame has historically required for entry.

I don't rate goalies based on traditional accomplishments like Vezina Trophies, postseason All-Star selections and Stanley Cups, but many people do, including apparently most of the Hall of Fame voting committee. In that type of evaluation method, I think it is important to consider the strength of a goalie's teammates and the quality of goaltending peers he was competing against, and to consider not just how many times a goalie won an award but also how many times he got close to winning. After all, the best goalie in a particular season and the best goalie in the league are not always the same thing. There are additional useful ways to verify how well a goalie was rated by his contemporaries, if you consider that to be an important piece of information, such as looking at observer accounts and other primary sources, salary/trade history, international selections, coach and player polls, etc.

That said, I still maintain that a careful analysis of historical statistical performance remains the best method to properly evaluate the accomplishments of a netminder, with care taken to adjust for team factors during the parts of the league history that were more unbalanced than others.