



It’s strange, isn’t it? One of the most universally accepted hockey rules of thumb is that if you don’t have good goaltending, you can’t win. The percentages in the expression vary, but you’ve likely heard it said that goaltending is 50 percent of the game for a team, unless you don’t have it, in which case it’s 100 percent.



Yet as best I can tell, very few people are certain which NHL goaltenders are good, and which are just OK. “Goaltending is voodoo” became a verbal staple from the analytics community after their many frustrated attempts to parse the slightly-better-than-OK from the slightly-worse-than-OK goaltenders proved fruitless. Maybe not fruitless, per se, but proved … more difficult to quantify than other aspects of the game.



Therefore, what we in the hockey community need to do, at least as a jumping-off point, is to start by trying to better understand the nuances of the position and...