Desire and Success

(I wrote the rough draft for this short post at the end of last season but never ran it, and was recently reminded of it while watching the Winnipeg Jets get beaten 5-1 in their home opener by the Montreal Canadiens. That was not entirely the same situation as the one described here, given that Montreal was certainly looking to add two points just like every other team this early in the season, but one still would have thought that the Jets players would have that extra motivation to kick off a new era of NHL hockey in Winnipeg with some success. Nevertheless, they still came up four goals short.)

There are abundant cliches in sports that attempt to relate winning to effort level. How many times have you heard an announcer say something like "they just wanted it more" in an attempt to explain why one team emerged victorious while the other team did not?

I've posted before about effort-based explanations being largely ridiculous at the professional level given the stakes involved, but there are some situations where there is in fact a clear imbalance in incentives between two teams, such as late in the season where one team is already out and the other is facing a must-win game. What happens in that case, does the team that wants it more always win?

During the last weekend of the 2010-11 regular season, three teams (Carolina, Chicago and Dallas) all controlled their own destinies and all only needed to win their final game to clinch a playoff berth (the Hawks actually only needed to get to OT). None of their opponents had anything to play for, as all three of them were either eliminated or could not change their playoff seeding. Carolina and Chicago were playing in front of their home fans, while Dallas got a non-playoff opponent in the Minnesota Wild. In addition, Detroit was the only one of the three opponents that went with their starting goalie. In every case, the situation looked very favourable for the team that needed to win to get in, especially if "wanting it more" is a good predictor of success in the NHL.

Those three teams combined to go 0-3. Every playoff home date is worth millions to their franchises and earning the opportunity to compete for a Stanley Cup has huge intangible benefits to NHLers yet all three teams squandered their chance. The Chicago Blackhawks did manage to qualify for the postseason, but only because they got lucky when Dallas also failed to seal the deal.

The statistical case for the heavy role of luck in hockey has been well-made, but there remains a resistance for many traditionally-minded hockey fans to accept numbers-based conclusions. That's why sometimes it is good to use other types of arguments (I particularly like the game-charting ones, like this one, for example, because they can't be simply dismissed out of hand by the people who have an ingrained anti-stats outlook). I'd submit that the fact that a team can have a skill advantage and home ice advantage and a starting goalie facing an opposing backup and a huge advantage in incentives and yet can still lose the game is a simple yet powerful observation that supports the heavy role of luck in the sport of hockey.

Goalie Effects on the Jack Adams Award

Last week Hockey Prospectus asked me to predict the 2011-12 award winners as part of its ongoing season preview. I usually just throw out names for that kind of thing because it's a pure guess anyway, and to be honest I'm not at all sure that I know much more than the next guy about who is going to be this year's best rookie or best defenceman or best coach.

Anyway, for Jack Adams I filled in Guy Boucher's name after not much more than a few seconds of thought about it. I figured he did a pretty good job last year and attracted lots of attention during Tampa's run to the Conference Finals, and if the Lightning finish with another 100+ point season maybe people would write his name down on their ballots.

Not too long afterwards, there was an insightful comment on Coppernblue by dkball7: "DeBoer should be everyone's pre-season pick for Jack Adams. As long as the team's PDO regresses to 100%, he will look like a genius."

In hindsight, it makes sense that I should not have picked a coach on a team that performed well the year before, like Boucher's Lightning, but should instead have picked one on a team that underachieved, like DeBoer's Devils. The Coach of the Year often goes to a candidate on a team that massively improved relative to the year before, which often is caused in large part by a significant swing in percentages from one year to the next.

I looked at the teams for each of the Jack Adams award winners since 1990, and compared each team's performance during the year where their coach picked up his hardware to the team's performance during the year prior and the year following. Here are the percentages, with everything adjusting to an average level of 10.0% shooting/.900 save percentage:

Prior to Jack Adams Year: 10.2% shooting, .897 goaltending, 99.9 PDO

During Jack Adams Year: 10.7% shooting, .909 goaltending, 101.6 PDO

Following Jack Adams Year: 10.4% shooting, .905 goaltending, 100.9 PDO

Only one out of 21 of the teams that produced a Jack Adams award winner posted a below-average save percentage during that season. In contrast, during the prior year, 13 out of those 21 teams had a below-average save rate. During the year after, the goaltending still remained strong for the most part, with just three teams dropping back to below-average save numbers.

The following year numbers imply that either the teams had slightly above average shooting and goaltending talent as a whole, or the award-winning coaches themselves combined for a positive effect on the team's numbers.

I think the goaltending numbers in the year after are more likely to reflect goalie talent than the coach's system of play. There were a number of top goalies represented (e.g. Hasek, Brodeur, Luongo, Thomas). Overall, the goalies had an average career save percentage of .906 over a period where the league average save percentage was .902. Considering that some of their careers stretched back further than 1989-90, when the league average was even lower, it seems reasonable that the combined goalies were about .005 better than league average, although it should be at least noted that some of the coaches in the sample have been known to affect shot quality, particularly guys like Burns and Lemaire, which may account for a small part of the above-average result.

It is interesting that many of the teams had the same goalie during the Jack Adams year as they did the season before. Eleven of 21 teams had the same starting goalie, with all of them playing a relatively similar number of games as well. Here are the save percentage numbers for the season prior, during and after, split out by whether the team had the same netminder as the year before (numbers adjusted again to league average with a baseline of .900):

Same goalie: .901, .909, .907

New goalie: .893, .909, .904

The largest improvements came for teams that brought in new goalies, obviously, but a good goalie coming off of an average season can also have a big impact in improving a team's fortunes and getting his head coach some extra attention.

The numbers do suggest that a lot of things simply went right for coaches during their winning years, but I certainly don't want to imply they had no effect at all. There is, for example, the shots for and against evidence, which shows that the teams also had a substantial improvement in their underlying possession metrics during the Jack Adams winning years. Teams playing for a Jack Adams winning coach were also more disciplined than average, as well as more disciplined compared to the year before.

Prior to Jack Adams Year: 1.005 SF/SA ratio, 362 PPOA

During Jack Adams Year: 1.064 SF/SA ratio, 340 PPOA

Following Jack Adams Year: 1.044 SF/SA ratio, 350 PPOA

Goaltending and shooting luck do not determine everything, but a lot of what the best coaches do is difficult to judge and rate, especially from a distance. For that reason, exernal factors can often come into play. As the old hockey saying goes, "Show me a good coach and I'll show you a great goaltender."

In summary, if you want to maximize your chance of being named the NHL's best coach, you should try to get a job on a team that either had awful goaltending the season before and made a move to address that weakness, or where a good goaltender had a down year. Either one of those scenarios would give a coach the best chance to see his team's percentages swing around in a hurry, leading to a significant improvement in the standings. That will in turn cause many people to think there must have been some coaching magic at work, and if you're lucky the awards recognition will soon follow.

To make a better Jack Adams prediction, we should apply this logic to this year's teams, and find a team with good goaltending that had weak goaltending last year and is likely to improve in the standings. The Flyers and Caps brought in new top-flight goaltenders, but both actually had pretty good save percentages last season. Several other teams have also improved in net but are still expected by most to finish near the bottom of the league and as a result are unlikely to produce a Jack Adams winner (Islanders with Nabokov, Senators with Anderson, Avalanche with Varlamov).

There are five teams that had subpar goaltending last season as well as overall PDOs below 100 that could be primed to do better in 2011-12:

New Jersey: 7.3 SH%, .906 Sv%

Toronto: 9.0 SH%, .907 Sv%

Tampa: 9.3 SH%, .903 Sv%

St. Louis: 9.5%, .902 Sv%

Columbus: 8.4%, .900 Sv%

Guy Boucher's Lightning show up on this list, suggesting that my random intuition may not have made that bad of a pick after all. There has to be some concern, however, for the fact that starter Dwayne Roloson is turning 42 next week. That said, he should still be better than the combo of Mike Smith and Dan Ellis (.894 last season), and Mathieu Garon will also provide improved backup goaltending. The Lightning may see their shooting regress slightly, but if they can duplicate last year's outshooting results and if Roloson can hang together to give them better goaltending then they will be definite challengers in the East. That could put Boucher in the conversation for Coach of the Year, but I'm not sure if it would be enough, especially if there is someone else out there who oversaw a much larger improvement in terms of wins and losses.

Age is also a concern for Martin Brodeur, but nobody is expecting a .903 again, and the New Jersey shooters are virtually guaranteed to improve (7.3% is a major outlier for a team shooting percentage). Jaroslav Halak also would be a good candidate for a bounceback year in St. Louis. If James Reimer is the real deal with .920 talent in the NHL he could certainly win Ron Wilson a trophy this year, but that still doesn't look to me like a good bet. As long as Columbus is going to continue to bet all their chips on Steve Mason I'm not sure I'll be expecting above-average goaltending in Columbus, although there likely could be some improvement there, perhaps even enough to get into the playoffs depending on luck and how well the rest of the team plays.

After considering this evidence, I think Peter DeBoer is the best pick for the 2012 Jack Adams, with all signs pointing to the Devils coming back strongly this season. There is always the chance, of course, that a team loses a star player and keeps on trucking, like Pittsburgh did in Dan Bylsma's award-winning campaign, or that one of the league's best teams has a spectacular year and cleans up at awards time, or that a team with a lot of new additions like Buffalo really comes together and climbs the standings. At the end of the day, the most likely winner is probably the coach who saw the largest improvement from the year before, and for this season the team with the best chance to improve is almost certainly the New Jersey Devils.

Why Doesn't Carolina Get Better Backup Goalies?

As I pointed out in my last post, the depth of talent among the league's goaltenders has improved substantially in the NHL over the last 15 seasons. Quality talent has never been more readily and cheaply available than now. At the same time, the salary cap has increased parity across teams, resulting in close playoff races nearly every season in both conferences. The simple conclusion to make based on this fact is that no team should accept awful backup goaltending. It doesn't cost much more to get average goaltending than it does to get replacement level goaltending, and bubble teams that are content to let a washed-up veteran or an over-his-head youngster play backup minutes are jeopardizing their playoff chances in doing so.

There has been one NHL franchise in particular that has seemed to not understand this principle, having been repeatedly burned by weak backup goaltending. That team is the Carolina Hurricanes.

Last year, Carolina finished two points behind the Rangers for 8th in the East, despite a terrific season by Cam Ward (37-26-10, 2.56, .923). Ward actually had a better win/loss record than Rangers starter Henrik Lundqvist (36-27-5), but the decisive difference that sent the Blueshirts to the playoffs at the expense of the 'Canes was what happened when neither #1 netminder was in the net. Solid veteran Martin Biron had a .923 save percentage and an 8-6-0 record in New York, while youngster Justin Peters was lit up in his infrequent playing time in Carolina (3-5-1, 3.98, .875). While Carolina saved money with Peters' $525K cap hit, it would have only cost them an extra $350,000 to pay a guy like Biron.

According to Capgeek, the Hurricanes had $9.5 million in salary cap room last season. Would the team's ownership have been willing to spend an extra $400K if they knew there was a good chance it would have helped the team earn the extra three standing points needed to earn millions in revenue from at least two extra playoff home dates? They would surely have agreed to that deal in a heartbeat. The Canes' management can't be entirely faulted, as Peters was a four-year minor league pro coming off a pretty good season in the AHL and he was probably at least somewhat unlucky to post numbers that terrible. On the other hand, one of the main reasons to get a good #2 option is to minimize the risk of a relying on a unknown quantity.

It was a similar story in Carolina in 2007-08. Ward wasn't quite as good back then, but much of the roster was just two years removed from winning the Cup. Despite a .904 save percentage, Ward's record was 37-25-5, easily good enough to put the 'Canes in playoff position. The problem was that backups John Grahame and Michael Leighton combined for a brutal 6-8-1, 3.58, .878, and the team was again left one win short of making the playoffs.

Backup goaltending left the 'Canes out of the playoff picture for a third time in '99-00, as the team finished an agonizing one point out after their backup goalies combined to go 3-7-1, 3.22, .883. Apparently the organizational indifference to goaltending depth was carried over from Hartford, as the Whalers had more or less the same thing happen in 1996-97 (two points out of the playoffs despite a great year from Sean Burke because the backups combined for .887 and a 10-17-5 record).

Over the last 17 seasons, the numbers are pretty staggering for the Whalers/Hurricanes franchise:

#1 goalies: .532 win %, 2.60, .911

Backups: .413 win %, 3.15, .890

Those splits aren't entirely fair because there may have been a few times when the preseason #1 goalie was supplanted by a backup (as was the case in 1997-98 with Trevor Kidd outplaying incumbent starter Sean Burke, for example). However, it is still perfectly correct to say that Carolina/Hartford has had mostly awful backup goaltending for the better part of two decades, and that has likely had a significant impact in causing the team to fall short of the playoffs on multiple occasions.

Scouting, evaluating and predicting goaltender performance is always difficult. Not every bet is going to pay off, and many organizations get decisions wrong. Take Buffalo, for example, a team that has developed and employed a number of top-quality netminders in recent years, yet still paid Patrick Lalime $2.65 million for three years of service where the Sabres went 9-26-5 in games where he got the decision. Lalime probably cost his team a playoff spot in '08-09, posting a 5-13-3 record as the Sabres fell just two points short.

There have been a number of other teams that were left outside the playoff pictures because of the performance of their backup goalies. Sometimes teams missed out because a goalie they counted on to be a starter or take on a significant workload in a platoon role simply had an awful season (e.g. '06-07 Avs, '08-09 Predators). Others simply had a few options behind their starting goalie ('09-10 Rangers, '06-07 Maple Leafs).

Most of these examples of weak backup goalies are dealing with small sample sizes, so it may not be entirely fair to blame the goalies. All the standard problems of relying on win/loss records for goalies apply, although in nearly all cases they had awful save stats as well. There may also have been other factors at work. Perhaps they weren't playing a favourable schedule, or maybe some of them just had puck luck go against them for 200-300 shots. There is the very large advantage of hindsight available to us now in pointing out some of these teams' decisions. Yet when there is a long-term trend of undeperformance, as is the case in Carolina, a reasonable criticism can certainly be advanced about the way the team handled their goalie situations.

The overall point is that while it is not smart to pay huge money for goalies, the depth of available goaltending talent means that you should never, ever have to settle for bad goaltending. If you have a hole on the roster, it really doesn't cost much more to pick up a veteran or an up-and-coming talent from Europe than it would to roll the dice on an unproven minor-leaguer in your system. For a penny-pinching playoff bubble team, it's probably well worth it to invest some decent money in goalie scouting and development or free agency to reduce the risk of having a not-ready-for-primetime backup come in and sink the season.

Over the summer Carolina signed Brian Boucher to a two-year deal worth $950,000 per year, which may be a sign that the organization is more willing to loosen up the purse strings for their backup position. Then again, the 'Canes haven't always gone with a backup like Justin Peters; over the last 17 years there have been a number of veterans who were brought in but didn't pan out. I think there is a good chance that pattern may repeat again with Boucher, a guy turning 35 in January with a post-lockout save percentage of .902. Boucher is expected to take more of the load off of Cam Ward this season, but he'll need to deliver good enough results, especially if the Hurricanes again find themselves in a dogfight in the middle of the Eastern Conference. If he does not, then the hopes of Carolina fans may yet again be dashed by their backup goaltender.

Goaltending Parity

I was flipping around Hockey Reference the other day, looking at the results from the 1995-96 NHL season. That was a strange year in many ways. The still-terrible expansion franchises in Ottawa and San Jose were both doing their part to skew the standings. In the West, Detroit cleaned up, winning 62 games to set a new league record, while the Wings' bitter rivals and eventual Cup champions Colorado Avalanache were the league's second-best regular season team, leading to a rare situation where 10 out of 13 Western Conference teams finished below .500. In the East it was the exact opposite situation, with nine teams finishing at 86 points or better, including the defending Stanley Cup champions from New Jersey who missed the playoffs despite a record that would have ranked them fourth in the West.

It was a unique year for goaltending as well, particularly as many of the big stars had off-seasons or down years. Patrick Roy got traded by Montreal, Ed Belfour had an off-year and was in the process of losing his starting job in Chicago, while Dominik Hasek and Martin Brodeur both played well but missed the playoffs. All that combined to allow a 22-year old sophomore named Jim Carey to walk off with the Vezina Trophy, all of the voters completely unaware that he would have only three seasons remaining in his professional career.

The league was still full of the old guard of standup goaltenders, many of whom were past their prime or struggling to keep up with the changing game. The result was a huge spread in the save percentage numbers among starting goalies, all the way from Hasek at the top with .920 down to Don Beaupre at .872.

The large gap in results was likely influenced by a higher level of shot quality differences across teams than we see today, particularly for goaltenders representing the Sens or the Sharks. However, even within teams there was a broad range of performance numbers, suggesting that goaltending was a real difference-maker back then. Going through team by team, it is impossible to avoid noticing that the starters almost always had much better win/loss records than the backups.

Compiling the numbers league-wide demonstrates this point (I just took the goalie with the most games played that season for each team to represent their "starter"):

Starters: 611-512-156, .539

Backups: 318-417-118, .442

The totals can be skewed a bit by some team's starters playing more games than others, but even if you take the average of each team's starter and backups you get .536 and .436, a full .100 increase in winning percentage with a team's most-used netminder in the game.

Only five out of 26 teams had a better win/loss record with their backup goalie(s) in the game. Only three more teams had their backups post a win percentage that was even within .050 of their starter.

Let's compare that to 2010-11:

Starters: 838-605-186, .572

Backups: 392-328-111, .539

That gap is much closer, even more so when the averages are taken for each team (starters .564, backups .547). Thirteen out of 30 teams had a better winning percentage when their top goalie didn't get the decision, and eight more had a difference of less than .050 between their starter and backups.

These results strongly confirm what analysts all over the place have been pointing out regarding today's goalies, that there is far more depth at the position today than in prior decades. The two big factors in the increased level of talent was the technical revolution sweeping the game and the increasing influx of European goaltenders.

In 1995-96, only 7 out of 78 goalies in the league were European (I don't count Olaf Kolzig as a European product, he grew up in Canada and played all his minor hockey there). They combined to play a total of 247 games.

By last season, there were 29 Europeans among the league's 87 goaltenders, meaning the percentage of Europeans rose from 9% to 33% in just 15 years. The European goaltenders also combined to play over four times as many games (1077) as they did in 1995-96.

Based on this evidence, it is perhaps unsurprising that there appears to have been a stronger correlation between goalie talent and championships won in the mid-to-late 1990s than in the post-lockout era, where the best goalies have mostly struggled to achieve much team success. Today, it's simply much harder to stand out from the pack.

The Significance of Two Vezinas

As everyone knows, strange things can happen to a single goalie over the course of a single season. Jose Theodore can win the Hart, Jim Carey can win the Vezina, Andrew Raycroft can win the Calder. There are a lot of goalies who had one great season mixed in with a nondescript or average career. Seen in retrospect, that year seems to be most likely founded on a lot of luck and perhaps aided by teammates, or else perhaps came at a point in time where the rest of the league was not yet aware of and able to exploit that netminder's particular weaknesses and tendencies. In a few cases, it is likely that the surprising goalies were legitimately performing at a high level for a brief peak, before later falling off to a lower standard of play as as result of injuries, age, or some other factor.

But two great seasons, that's a different story.

Those who are interested in the Hall of Fame debate often look at comparables, trying to determine if a player with a specific profile has company already in the Hall of Fame. For example, if all players who finished top-10 in scoring X number of times are already inducted, then it seems reasonable to view that as support for any player who achieved that same number of top finishes.

For goalies, there is a very simple Hall of Fame cutoff that so far works with 100% success: Every goalie with 2 or more First Team All-Star selections is a Hall of Famer.

That is not to say that every goalie in the Hall of Fame was voted at least twice as the game's best goalie. Several of them only achieved that honour once, and Gerry Cheevers never did it at all. But everyone with two is in, and that brings us to Tim Thomas.

Tim Thomas had one of the most impressive goalie seasons ever last year, especially when the playoffs are taken into account. Including the postseason, Thomas played in 82 games and stopped 93.9% of the shots against him. His even strength save percentage over that stretch was simply off the charts at .948. That's a level that nobody has come close to since Dominik Hasek was in his prime. Assuming no shot quality or scorer bias effects, Thomas was about 45 goals better than a league average (.913) goalie during the regular season, and another 23 goals better in the playoffs. Thomas faced 33 shots per game in the playoffs and still ranked #1 in GAA. In short, he not only had video game numbers, but he was absolutely dominant at the most important time of the year. In my opinion, Thomas should have won the Hart Trophy.

Does that mean Tim Thomas is a Hall of Famer? With a Cup and a Conn Smythe to go with his two Vezinas, his trophy case is already worthy of the Hall, but longevity really hurts him in any such discussion. Thomas was already 31 years old when he first won an NHL starting job, and at the age of 37 he only has 319 career regular season games played. It remains to be seen how many campaigns are left for a goalie who thrives on his athleticism, but if Thomas can keep his game at a high level for another three or four seasons, he would at least be approaching the numbers that would make it seem like much less of a long shot (500 career games, 50 career shutouts, a career save percentage in the .920 range). At least it wouldn't if the Hall is open to rewarding dominance, rather than just counting longevity and career compiling. With his current 90th place ranking on the career wins list, Thomas isn't likely to end up among the all-time leaders in any of the counting categories.

It will be interesting to watch the conclusion of Thomas' career, to see whether he is the modern-day Johnny Bower or if he merely has a short but meteoric prime. Either way, he will be an interesting test case as a Hall of Fame candidate a decade or so down the road.

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.