Wednesday, April 11, 2012

NHL Regular Season Goalie Evaluation

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