Boston Bruins goalie Tuukka Rask, of Finland, deflects a shot on goal during the second period of an NHL hockey game against the San Jose Sharks Thursday, Dec. 4, 2014, in San Jose, Calif. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

(Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.)

There is a huge shortcoming when you talk about goaltender evaluation at just about any level of hockey:

We only have one number that really tells us anything about their quality.

All we have is save percentage. That's it. There's not a lot more we can really do at this point to objectively understand their efficiency, efficacy, and so on when it comes to doing anything involved in their job, except for what it ultimately boils down to: Stopping the puck.

For example, who's the best in the NHL at getting from one post to the other? Who takes up the most net? Who best takes away scoring chances in 1-on-1 situations? These are all measures that probably could be measured, but not right now, and that means that while we can have opinions as to who does all those things better than anyone else, it's very, very subjective.

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The good news is that we are at least getting better at this sort of thing. Shot location data is easier to come across now than it ever has been, so we're getting a pretty good idea of how likely a shot from x part of the ice is to go in, generally speaking. Obviously, Steven Stamkos taking a shot from the hashmarks has a much better chance of going in than Brandon Bollig shooting on the same goalie from the same spot. Likewise, Henrik Lundqvist is statistically going to be far more likely to stop that shot than Ondrej Pavelec.

But again, we have a general idea of how “shot quality” figures into this sort of thing.

Which is why the quality-adjusted save percentage stat that has been developed in the last few years is so valuable. As the name implies, it adjusts for the overall quality of shot the goaltender faces — i.e. giving them more credit for stopping higher-percentage, quality shots — to somewhat level the playing field (it does not, however, account for shot volume, meaning busier goalies get no real benefit here).

This was something that became rather hard to ignore when Craig Custance released his now-annual ranking of the league's 30 likely starting goalies on a scale of 1-5, with 1 being the best. This is a poll of six GMs, one assistant GM, three head coaches, and four goalie coaches. These are, then, guys you can safely consider “hockey people,” who watch a lot of games and have a lot of experience in the sport.

And yet, the actual rankings they handed in two years running really didn't really make a lot of sense. How, for example, is Jonathan Quick better than Tuukka Rask? How are there 11 goalies in the league rated more highly than Braden Holtby? How is Jonathan Bernier worse than Ondrej Pavelec? There are a lot of questions you can ask here, but even if you check out their justifications (and you should, because the whole thing is really interesting) you're left asking how Mike Smith, for instance, “has as much talent as any guy on the list.” He, in fact, has a long and demonstrated statistical history of exactly the opposite, save for one season in which he was inexplicably a .930 goalie over 67 games.

Well, funny you should ask.

“It comes down to confidence and consistency,” said one coach. “And being about to go out night after night and reproduce what his strengths are.”

And that is just the kind of mumbo-jumbo you hear a lot with goalies because, again, they are incredibly difficult to evaluate. Even statistically minded people will repeat over and over that “Goalies are voodoo,” but what that really means is that they have a position that is more likely to be ruled by randomness than any other in the sport.

For goalies, the difference between a good season and a bad one is failing to stop an extra 10 shots out of 1,000 in a lot of cases. But over time (say, the last three years) quality-adjusted save percentage is going to tell you a lot about a goaltender's quality in a lot of cases.

What made things a little tricky this year is the fact that Edmonton and San Jose are both using goalies with very good statistical profiles — Martin Jones and Cam Talbot rank first and third, respectively, in adj. 5v5 sv% over that time — with very little actual in-game experience. Most goalies on this list have more starts in a given season than they have in their brief careers as backups, as you might expect. Buffalo and St. Louis are both likewise going with inexperienced hands who were ranked on this list, but whose stats were a little less rosy. Even Minnesota's Devan Dubnyk is little-used in comparison with a lot of these guys.