MORE MONEY DOES NOT MEAN BETTER
the difference between the eighth goalie in the league and the 15th goalie, it’s a big difference in money. It’s not a big difference in performance.
The really remarkable thing is that there are plenty of guys in the average range who weren’t making much money and would have represented a rather significant improvement on some of those big-money tenders at the bottom end of the group
GVS – FINDING THE BEST VALUE IN NET
(Aug 2009)
Given its importance, how much should each team spend on goaltending in the new NHL era of the salary cap?
In the end, today’s era of salary cap NHL does not necessarily reward the teams that spend the most on goaltending, but rather the organizations that get the best value for their money.
ARE EXPENSIVE GOALIES WORTH THE MONEY
making a mistake on a goalie really puts you behind the rest of the league, in terms of the salary that’s committed to someone who isn’t performing.
It's clear that dropping $3M+ for multiple years on a goalie has not had a good rate of return in recent years.
If your team has a league-average goalie signed to a bargain contract today, you’d better hope they don’t decide they need to sign Evgeni Nabokov in the off-season.
DO YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR
goalies’ production and cost are almost completely unlinked.
That’s not because general managers don’t appreciate the importance of save percentage; it’s because goalie performance is very difficult to predict.
IS MONEY SPENT ON GOALIES BETTER USED ELSEWHERE
Spending big money on a goaltender likely comes at the expense of signing better skaters.
While we can safely assume that there is a correlation between salary and ability in goaltenders, we cannot escape the reality that dollars are fixed, and money spent on goaltenders cannot be spent on skaters. This makes it difficult for teams that spend large chunks of salary on goalies to build teams that dominate at even strength.
relying so heavily on your netminder is not a recipe for success over multi-year timeframes.
PEKKA RINNE – IS HE WORTH IT
There isn’t a very strong relationship between a goaltender’s cap hit and how much value in wins he turned out to provide to his team. This is a sign that maybe high-price goaltenders as a group are overpaid
DON’T SPEND MONEY ON GOALTENDERS
While save percentage correlates with winning, it isn’t exactly proven that spending money on a goaltender will guarantee a team success.
The correlation between “dollars spent for marginal unit of save percentage” and wins was minimal, with an r-squared of -.00239.
You’re probably still better off taking a risk on a cheaper guy than an expensive one, particularly if your budget is limited by more than a salary cap. It’s impossible to predict how goaltenders will do over the course of the season, and even educated guesses can be bad buys over a full season
HOW EFFICIENT IS NHL GOALIE MARKET
(July 2012)
The more you spend – in general – the better your team’s save percentage. (We expected that.) But teams that spend more on goaltending are no more efficient than those that spend less.
Given that uncertainty, it is almost certainly better to spend less money on goalies and to give them the shortest contracts possible; forwards and defensemen are much more likely to be sure things, and you’re better off paying for certainty.
GOALIE MARKET VALUE CAP HIT
We should expect Rinne and Lundqvist to save about 1% more shots than a reasonable backup.
we might expect them to save an extra 15-16 goals per season. That translates to about two and a half wins,
It’s true that goalie performance varies quite a bit from year to year, but that’s not something you can avoid. You’ll be stuck with that variability no matter which goalie you sign. However, a good goalie’s good years will be better and his bad years will be less bad – that doesn’t mean his bad years will be better than someone else’s good years, but the average will clearly be better.
It seems that the pool of goaltenders is getting deeper and stronger, which presents an added risk for a long-term deal – the superior talent that you sign today may find the league catching up to him over the course of his multiyear deal.
they should spend big money for an upper-tier goalie only if their prospects don’t pan out and they find themselves with a team that is capable of competing for a championship in the near term.
HOW GOALIES FIT IN CAP STRUCTURE
(Sept 2018)
We can broadly say that team spending behavior on goalies is random. In other words, teams don’t apply similar strategies to how they spend on goaltending. Furthermore, there’s no indication that will change either.
1. Given that year-over-year reliability is low and historical results relative to cap hit are all over the map, should teams even spend a lot on the position?
2. There is an additional consideration of opportunity cost.
3. If teams continue to pay high salaries for presumed quality goaltending, limiting term is another way to mitigate risk.
4. Mitigating risk and liability are how teams manage the constraints around the salary cap effectively.
5. Goaltending remains a tough aspect of the game to predict, not just from a productivity perspective, but also from an economical perspective.
DO TEAMS GET BETTER GOALTENDING SPENDING MORE MONEY
goaltending performance is subject to a significant element of randomness. This has led some people, including myself, to argue that teams should try to limit their spending on goaltending, since one goalie would seem to be as likely as any other to get good results.
If paying more money doesn’t actually get better results in net, then it’s pointless to have a highly priced goaltender
Comparing SV%, HDSV%, dFSV%, GSAx/60 to cap hit, there is a positive correlation.
The only difference between highly paid goalies and their lower-priced counterparts was in their HDSV%.
on the whole there is a clear relationship between how much a goalie gets paid and how well he performs.
Higher paid goalies tend to have a higher floor; there are good results spread out somewhat across the salary spectrum, but the very worst results are always from the least expensive goalies.
In general, goalies who are paid more money are providing better goaltending.
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