MYTH OF THE HOT GOALTENDER
(May 11, 2012)
There is very little difference between goalies and perfectly consistent robots, and certainly nowhere near enough difference between the goalies to label one of them streaky and another consistent.
THE HOT HAND AND COACHES AS EVALUATORS
Riding the hot hand, one-quarter of the time, the coach looks like a genius goaltender evaluator – purely by luck. And over the course of two seasons, two out of 30 NHL coaches will look like multi-year geniuses, again, purely by luck.
I’m not saying that coaches have no talent for evaluating goaltenders. And I’m not saying that goaltenders aren’t streaky – I believe they exhibit more variation in their save percentage than we would expect purely by luck alone. But it’s important to keep in mind that what appears to be brilliant talent evaluation may very well be blind luck
HOT HAND VS LARGE SAMPLE SIZE
Basically, it makes no difference.
In the grand scheme of things, if a team chooses to slightly overplay a backup or give a journeyman goalie a few not-necessarily-deserved starts because he is the "hot hand" and the main guy is struggling, that has very little impact on the team's overall chances across 82 games.
For the most part I can’t find myself getting too worked up about a little bit of suboptimal regular season goalie handling over the course of a long season.
A HOT HAND ISN’T BETTER
During the regular season, save percentage (the generally accepted shorthand measure of goaltending effectiveness) explains a higher proportion of team performance than any other fundamental factor in hockey.
In the playoffs, the emphasis on goaltending only intensifies; save percentage is easily the most important determinant of a team’s goals-per-game differential in the postseason.
A hot goalie really is the key to a successful playoff run.
The correlation of goalie performance from year to year is so low that, in practical terms, only 30 percent of the difference we see between a goalie and the league average in any given season actually “belongs” to the goalie himself. The rest is just random.
As a consequence, the “replacement-level” save percentage for goalies (the production a team could expect from a minimum-salary player freely available on the waiver wire) is remarkably close to league average.
Given what little information we have about any goalie’s actual talent, a backup is almost as likely to give above-replacement production as a struggling starter is.
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