I took a tiny break from the Free Agency madness to flip through Alan Ryder's voluminous year in review (found via Brodeur is a Fraud). I've only skimmed over it's 50 some pdf pages, but the section on goaltending really caught my eye:
Isolating shots and shot quality lets one better assess goaltending. The impact of goaltending is highest when a strong goalie allows ‘few’ goals notwithstanding a high number of shots faced and / or shots of high quality.
...
Calgary suffers from goaltending delusions. The Flames remember Kiprusoff as he was. His goals against average (the second most useless statistic in hockey) is trimmed by good defensive play. His play has been going downhill for a couple of years now.
Ryder's analysis shows that Calgary a.) didn't really have that bad of defensive team last year and b.) they suffered from some rather awful goaltending. Not "pretty bad" relative to Kipper's previous stellar contributions, but bad in an absolute sense, ie; league performance. In fact, the Flames had the 5th worst goaltending by Ryder's Marginal Goals metric - ahead of only Tampa Bay, Carolina, Columbus, Washington and Tampa Bay (no wonder the SE is so bad). The reason this is so disconcerting as a Flames fan is it's been happening for awhile, as Ryder points out.
(-30) Kiprusoff has gone from a save percentage of .923 in 2006 to
.917 in 2007 to .906 in 2008.
That's from his "biggest swings in goaltending" section. And if his analysis in the the 2008 review can be trusted, Kippers deterioration can't be laid at the feet of team effects.
Kiprusoff is poised to make 8M in real cash next year and his cap-hit balloons to 5.83M. If his notable decline isn't halted - indeed, reversed - none of the other things Sutter is currently doing wont matter all that much. The Flames will likely be on the outside looking in come April. I half-jokingly made a suggestion that Sutter deal Kipper at the deadline last February with his decline and impending raise in mind...it seems even less ridiculous now. Hopefully the quiet Finn rebounds and proves me wrong though.
I haven't looked in depth at Ryder's data, but take a gander yourself if you're so inclined. It's certainly not all bad news either: some of Ryder's work reveals just how good Jarome Iginla and Damond Langkow are.
9 comments:
He has Adrian Aucoin as the 9th best defenceman in the league last year. Very impressive for a guy that was on Calgary's third pair after the Vandermeer trade.
/sarcasm.
I noticed his high esteem for Aucoin too...I dont know how much he takes into account quality of competition or team SH% (for and against) in that section of his analysis (obviously, not a lot).
I'll probably go through it in more depth later. His stuff on goaltending agreed closely with my own observations of Kipper, which is why I foregrounded it. It may or may not stand up under further scrutiny.
As for Aucoin...he was on the 3rd pair even before Vandermeer got here (thus the constantly horrible Eriksson/Phaneuf pairing).
I just finished a quick read through, mostly to see where Calgary players looked good.
The biggest surprise was seeing where our defence popped up. Phaneuf showed up for just the reasons we would expect: a strong player based on his ability to score goals and draw penalties, held back mostly by his habit of taking penalties.
Aucoin shows up because of a solid all around contribution. And Regehr and Sarich both show up as successful penalty killers.
There are a few reasons where I'm hesitant to support these findings. From what I can tell, quality of competition is not factored in at all. Since we know that this varies significantly, this is the biggest weakness in the numbers. I'm also not sure whether improved performances would scale as we would expect them to. If Kipper played better last season, would it improve the team's performance enough that the defence's performance would stay the same? Should that be the case? And finally, this gives a measure of performance over the whole season. But we know that performance changes over time. Kipprusoff is a great example of this. He was a much better goalie by the end of the season. Did the whole team improve as a result? Did the defence get progressively worse? We need some kind of trend to know for sure.
Alan Ryder competes with Damien Cox every year for my annual "Worst Hockey Journalist EVAR" award. He wins every year.
He's really outdone himself with this latest report. From the classy touches like misspelling Iginla's name to the absurd metrics and ranking of players, to his rant about how Nabokov didn't deserve to be named to the all-star team (and he tops that off with a supreme arrogance and disdain for 'hockey writers').
Do you read his NHL statistics columns on the Globe and Mail website? They're hilariously bad, I'm not sure this guy understands the very basics of the games. He's blinded by numbers such that he can't see the forest through the trees.
I'm all for intelligent analysis of hockey and advanced statistical models, but this guy is just so far off the mark that it's pure comedy.
Well, that's 3 "nays". Ryders getting beaten up here. Perhaps I should have given this more than a cursory glance?
Perhaps I should have given this more than a cursory glance?
No, I think it's a good thing you didn't...
Looks like he came up with what he thought were reasonable heuristics, then didn't use (or was too lazy to use) a large enough sample set to cross-validate what he came up with. So his results march right along, up until the data stops fitting the curve (by, like, data point #4. Sigh.)
I wouldn't write it off too quickly. I have some questions about how the numbers actually work, but those questions arise because I haven't read all the supplementary material yet.
I don't know anything about the author, but his numbers seem to match my impressions of players, at least the ones I know fairly well. Aucoin is probably a bad player to focus on. Remember that Desjardins ranks him highly for +/- as well. I think this thing deserves a closer look, whether that supports the conclusions or not.
As a side note, I just love how Damien Cox bashes the Leafs and their fans repeatedly, while working for a Toronto paper... its one of the small things that make living in the 'heart' of Leaf 'nation' all that much sweeter... but yeah, he is pretty brutal...
ST: then you need to visit "cox Bloc", listed in my sidebar there. They beat up on that guy mercilessly.
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