Sunday, December 7, 2014

The bitter-sweet future for hockey-goalies

The value of good goaltending is widely and sometimes heavily discussed. The mainstream opinion is that good goaltending is essential, a good goaltender is 50% of the team-success. My personal opinion is a bit more reserved to this. I think if you want to be a contender you need to have at least average goaltending but not necessarily top-goaltending (there are historically and in the present a lot of world-wide examples of championship-teams with average goaltending). And what about the myth of the Mr.50%? I just don’t “eat” this, this is exaggerated. However: In any case as a team-responsible manager you always have to try to find the best goalie possible... the big question is: For what price?

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Goalie is the most improved position in hockey in the last 10 years. In the last NHL-season the average save-percentage was as high as 91.4%! The best number ever! I guess - however, I didn’t check it to be honest - we have very similar results in minor- and European pro-leagues. Thank’s to a lot of very good goalie-coaches and analysts all over the hockey-planet we never had such a big amount of good goalies and more is to come! If you dig deeper in the NHL-goalie-stats you’ll find out very soon that the difference between the best goalies and the approx. No.100 ranked goalies is smaller than ever. This is the sweet truth for hockey-goalies: You are playing the game on a very high level, easily the highest level ever. The depth of good goalies is also better than ever! Dropping some examples and names: Calvin Pickard, COL, started as the No.3 goalie in the Avs depth-chart and put on the best numbers so far. CHI goalie Corey Crawford got injured and the No. 2 Antti Raanta needs a rest? Depth-chart No.4 goalie Scott Darling takes over and puts on a show, save-percentage-numbers around 93% and this in the handful NHL-games as well as in close to a dozen AHL-games. 

ever heard of Scott Darling before the start of this season?


The Winnipeg Jets have a goalie-problem with their supposed to be No.1 Ondrej Pavelec? Their No.2-4-goalies Michael Hutchinson, Connor Hellebuyck and very young Eric Comrie are just brilliant in whatever league they are playing. They have three very good goalies awaiting to take over... There are more expamples like that in the NHL but here comes some from Europe, from Switzerland: The ZSC Lions did lose in the last couple of years Tim Wolf, Melvin Nyffeler and Lukas Meili to other teams because the No.1-goalie position seemed to be fixed in stone for years to come in Zurich. So one could guess that their goalie-pipeline is more or less dry after three losses within the last couple of years. Not so fast: Their No.1-goalie Lukas Flüeler had some small injuries here and there and couldn’t play for a couple of weeks alltogether. Veteran Urban Leimbacher, a B-leauge-goalie did take over for a couple of games, youngster Niklas Schlegel (picture)


and Luca Boltshauser for another handful of games... and the result? Not really a big difference for the ZSC-Lions. All these replacement-goalies did do an average to good or even in some cases a very good job. Similar things happened in Geneva. Their 1st and 2nd goalie were out because of injuries and a no-name-goalie did arrive for temporarily relief, performed very solid and Geneva had the same or maybe even better results than with their regular-goalies.

So what does this mean? And now we come closer to the bitter truth for hockey-goalies: The competition for the goalie-position was never as tough as nowadays and there is no reason why this will change soon in the future (again thank’s to excellent goalie-coaches worldwide). As a team-responsible you will start to think twice to pay high-end money to a goalie because if you can’t sign him you just take the next best and you know the next best is just slightly worse – if any – than the prime-target... but the prime-target, respectively their agents, need to start to become careful in terms of looking for 7 or 8 Mio deals per year for their goalie-clients, talking in NHL-numbers. The GM might refuse it, even if the goalie is really high-end. Personally I strongly believe that in future we will see less goalies with 7 or 8 Mio-contracts in the NHL and possibly the same goes for high-end goalies in the European leagues, of course with converting these numbers to local standards.

So, the bitter-sweet outlook for goalies is: You never did play the game better than now, you goalies did improve your plays really a lot... and all this will lead into a little bit smaller salaries. Strange logic for the ones who just think with their technical hockey brain. Clear logic if you follow your economical brain. The market is talking, also in hockey!

Thomas Roost                                                                             Horgen, 7th December 2014


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