Story by
Why are so many teams getting bad goaltending?
Jake Allen's inconsistency is a constant, but rough goaltending numbers league-wide are a surprise. (NBC)
Here's maybe the craziest stat of this young season: 13 NHL teams are getting sub-.900 goaltending through about 25 games. And three more are dead even at .900.
That is, for those who aren't the best at math, a little more than half the teams in the league getting goaltending that would have been unconscionable even last year.
Advertisement
It's still relatively early in the season and things always kind of trend toward "lower-scoring" as the campaign progresses, but only four teams had .900-or-worse goaltending last season: Carolina, Ottawa, Buffalo, and the Islanders . Two years ago, just two teams (Colorado and Dallas) ended up there. The year before that, only one.
It makes sense when two, three, maybe four teams end up with save percentages that start with a ".8," for sure, but when half the league is in that range, it should raise a lot of eyebrows.
The obvious question is, of course, "Why?"
It isn't as though half the goaltenders in the league woke up one morning and were like, "Ah, what if I became terrible all of a sudden?" But I do have a lot of theories here.
Advertisement
First and foremost, the league is getting younger, faster, and smarter meaning that there's more of a tendency to just shoot the puck a lot. The average number of team shot attempts per 60 minutes in all situations has gone up about 7 percent since 2015-16 —from 53.6 to 57.4 this year, and the latter number is actually down from the full-season 58.1 seen in 2017-18.
However, the number of expected-goals scored has increased 11 percent in all situations over that same time frame, meaning teams aren't just generating a greater quantity of shots, but also a greater quality. Shots on goal are up 8.7 percent, as well, meaning they represent a larger share of attempts than they used to, but that certainly doesn't answer the question of why expected goals are rising so sharply.
Neither does the fact that, while medium- and high-danger shots on goal are on the rise, they're not rising so sharply that you'd expect such an increase in expected-goal generation. At least, not as a share of total shots, because they've risen from 59.5 percent of SOG to 60.1, which is a negligible difference.
Put another way: Goalies basically face one extra shot from a scoring area per 60 minutes now, but that's also true of low-danger shots.
Advertisement
So maybe you say this is the smaller pads doing what they're intended to do and increasing goal scoring. The league-wide save percentage on high-danger chances is up a little bit over the past four seasons, but on medium-danger looks it's way down (falling from .922 in 2015-16 to .907 today) and even if that's a small-sample thing the fact is that last year the league-average save percentage on mid-danger SOG was still trending downward from where it had been.
It stands to reason that smaller pads would be responsible for more medium-danger goals. Those are goals on good shots, and an extra inch or two of space as a guy tries to roof it or whatever would result in more goals. High-danger save percentages being relatively static also makes sense because, if you're in close, the extra few degrees of shooting-angle aren't as beneficial for shooters.
And this is a less verifiable thing, but instinctually I look at the teams with the .900-or-worse save percentages and say, "That's a lot of teams with old or banged-up goalies." It doesn't fully account for, say, Sergei Bobrovsky 's slow start in Columbus, or why Carolina can't get a save from anyone but Curtis McElhinney , but Calgary, Vegas, Montreal, New Jersey, Edmonton, Chicago, Ottawa, Florida, and Philadelphia all have guys who were intended to be the No. 1 who started the year at least 31 or 32 years old. Other teams, like St. Louis or San Jose, should have known that what they had just might not have been good enough to achieve the ends they might have wanted.
And a lot of those older guys are just where they are because teams locked them into contracts that were always going to age poorly. Not to go off on too much of a rant here, but it's lately seemed to me that goaltenders shouldn't be coming into the league at 24, 25 years old. With what we know about guys' aging curves and all that kind of stuff, the idea that guys aren't ready to be NHL goalies before they've been a pro for three or four years seems like a risk. Especially because, if a goalie ends up being any good, you're probably going to tie yourself to longer-term, bigger-money deals for what's mostly going to be his decline years.
Advertisement
The combination of a faster league, older goalies being all but assured starters' gigs against those higher-tempo opponents, shrinking equipment and a sample of less than a third of a season would seem to explain things. Throw in the standard "sometimes bad luck happens to you" warnings and that feels about right.
Plus, like, Jake Allen and Mike Smith still regularly get starts. Which is always gonna hurt the league average.
Ryan Lambert is a Yahoo Sports hockey columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
All stats via Corsica unless otherwise noted.
