Tonight starts the NHL playoffs, so I thought that I would take a look at how productive NHL goalies were during the 2011-2012 NHL regular season. In order to do so
David Berri and I
published a paper in the Journal of Sports Economics in 2010 on NHL goalies. We named our measure of NHL goalie productivity WAA.
WAA the absolute value (since a goal against has a negative effect on team wins) of the marginal value of a goal against divided by two (since each win is worth two standings points) times the number of shots on goal that goalie faces times the difference in the save percentage of the goalie and the average save percentage of all goalies for that season. I am using -0.221519 for the marginal value of a goal. I plan on updating this value using data from the 2011-2012 season, but have not had the time. Note, any change in the marginal value will just be a monotonic transformation of the WAA (either increase or decrease) from its current value.
Given our measure of NHL goalie performance, here is the top 20 ranking for NHL goalies over the 2011-2012 regular season. (I hope to get some time to give a step-by-step guide as to how I am getting the WAA numbers later this month.)
| Rank | Player | Team |
| WAA |
| SV% |
| 1 | Mike Smith | PHX |
| 3.767 |
| 0.930 |
| 2 | Henrik Lundqvist | NYR |
| 3.196 |
| 0.930 |
| 3 | Jonathan Quick | LAK |
| 3.191 |
| 0.929 |
| 4 | Brian Elliott | STL |
| 2.849 |
| 0.940 |
| 5 | Cory Schneider | VAN |
| 2.456 |
| 0.937 |
| 6 | Pekka Rinne | NSH |
| 2.256 |
| 0.923 |
| 7 | Miikka Kiprusoff | CGY |
| 1.686 |
| 0.921 |
| 8 | Jaroslav Halak | STL |
| 1.672 |
| 0.926 |
| 9 | Kari Lehtonen | DAL |
| 1.630 |
| 0.922 |
| 10 | Tim Thomas | BOS |
| 1.187 |
| 0.920 |
| 11 | Jimmy Howard | DET |
| 1.071 |
| 0.920 |
| 12 | Tuukka Rask | BOS |
| 1.064 |
| 0.929 |
| 13 | Roberto Luongo | VAN |
| 0.954 |
| 0.919 |
| 14 | Niklas Backstrom | MIN |
| 0.786 |
| 0.919 |
| 15 | Jose Theodore | FLA |
| 0.576 |
| 0.917 |
| 16 | Carey Price | MTL |
| 0.522 |
| 0.916 |
| 17 | Jean-Sebastien Giguere | COL |
| 0.514 |
| 0.919 |
| 18 | Tomas Vokoun | WSH |
| 0.498 |
| 0.917 |
| 19 | Ryan Miller | BUF |
| 0.488 |
| 0.916 |
| 20 | Justin Peters | CAR |
| 0.451 |
| 0.931 |