written by: @TheGersReport

For anyone who has ever published a blog, or even sent out a tweet, sometimes you can’t help yourself…you can’t stop yourself from checking out how many ‘views’ your work has gotten. Even though I haven’t published anything on my old site in over a year, I still check regulary to see what old posts are still getting read. Interestingly, the one post that gets checked out on a near regular basis is one that was a simple table of advanced goalkeeping stats for Scottish Championship goalies from the 2015-16 season.

Every other week or so, there’s a little run of hits on that post & it serves as a reminder that…I used to really enjoy keeping track of goalie shot-stopping stats. Now, I freely acknowledge that shot-stopping is only one isolated aspect of a goalie’s job & there are much smarter people than me out there adding many more layers to the statistical analysis of goalkeepers…but there is still a lot that can be learned from shot-stopping stats.

Like any dabbling in fitba analytics…it’s with the outliers that the real learning can happen…like this example from 2017 that highlighted how analytics could prevent poor recruitment of squad players.

This time around, I wanted to continue my trend of simply lifting good ideas from the hockey analytics world to see what it would look like when applied to the Scottish Premiership.

One of the most embraced advanced stats for evaluating NHL goaltenders is Goals Saved Above Average, which takes a look at a goalies save percentage numbers & compares it to the league average for the kinds of shots that goalie faced. Basically, if you put a league average goalie in the exact same situations as the goalie being evaluated….how many more (or less) goals would that league average goalie allow.

For example, the goalie with the best Goals Saved Above Average (GSAA) rate last season in the Premiership was Hibs’ goalkeeper Ofir Marciano. If the league average goalie came in & faced the exact same shots on target that Marciano faced…that league average goalie would have allowed 4.23 more goals. On the flip side, the goalie with the worst GSAA rate was Hamilton’s Gary Woods. If the Accies threw the #1 jersey on a league average goalie in Wood’s place, that league average goalie would have allowed 15.67 LESS goals than Woods did.