A little while back I wrote a column saying that goaltending controversies are almost always overblown by the media and that, in reality, teams usually ought to have a pretty good idea of which of their goalies is the best.

One team that is quite notably going through a goaltending controversy right now, entirely because they put themselves in this position, is the Calgary Flames.

This is a club with a lot of evidence as to which of their goaltenders gives them the best chance to win every night, and unlike most goaltending controversies, this isn't some ginned-up story to fill column inches: By all appearances, they legitimately just don't know which of their three (three? Three.) goalies to play.

First and foremost, they have Jonas Hiller, a long-time NHL starter who is self-evidently at least average and sometimes a little above that. He's in the final season of a two-year deal that pays him $4.5 million against the cap. He is the guy they should be playing most of the time because he is the one with the best career stats by far. In general, you want your goalie to be the one that's clearly good rather than the one that is more of a mystery.

That mystery, who happened to get the start as the Flames were beaten to a pulp in the season opener by a Vancouver team that's the definition of middling, is Karri Ramo. He's only been back in the NHL for two seasons and never really overwhelmed anyone with his play (a little below league average both years), but when Hiller faltered a little bit the Flames switched to a platoon, and never really stopped improbably winning. Thus the roots of the controversy really began to take hold in the fertile soil of a team already believing in magic vis a vis why it had success.

Calgary's crowded crease was further complicated by the fact that, for all Ramo's apparent success last year, he was on an expiring UFA deal and could have walked in the summer. GM Brad Treliving instead opted to re-sign him for $3.9 million for one year, just $600,000 less than Hiller, for reasons that still aren't all that clear except that perhaps his sub-mediocre save percentage did not actually present any tangible detriment to the team in terms of wins and losses.

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Another $600,000 problem obfuscating the issue: Joni Ortio. He's a rookie goaltender with just 15 games of NHL experience (pretty much all of them bad; he's a career .899 goalie at 24 years old) who prior to 2014-15 signed a two-year deal that guaranteed him a one-way, $600,000 contract in the second year of the contract. At that time, that didn't seem like a terrible idea because Ramo looked like he wasn't long for the organization, which would have made Ortio — who has a decent track record both in his native Finland and the AHL — the backup.

But now there's this mess higher up on the depth chart to deal with. As a consequence, Ortio was scratched for the season opener, and the team is carrying three goalies for at least the foreseeable future.

All of which is a long way of saying that this is a problem of their own creation, and the rumors about them trading Hiller at least made some semblance of sense because, while the other two guys clearly aren't as good, he's therefore the only one who would fetch much value on the market. Not that any team should trade a Hiller to clear roster space for a Ramo or Ortio, especially if they're looking to win hockey games as the Flames apparently are, but when you paint yourself into a corner, your most desirable option isn't going to be available to you.

So here's the question: If you have ample evidence that Hiller is the better goalie, why do you not start him on opening night?

This question led me to wonder if there was something in the numbers I wasn't necessarily picking up on from looking at the basic stats alone.

The first thing that occurred to me here was to check the adjusted save percentages for all three goalies. Ortio's was garbage (.897) but Ramo and Hiller were in the same general area at least (.922 and .927, respectively). One had to wonder, though, whether that was the result of Ramo facing more high-quality shots; the adjusted numbers, as the name implies, try to control for that sort of thing, which is why the field between them comes off as being so even in the first place, but still, it stands to reason that if a goalie can post a reasonably good save percentage on high-quality chances, there's a pretty solid chance that he will appear to be better than he actually is.

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