Leland Irving: comparables

Projecting goalies is extremely difficult. Their development road is far more difficult than skaters and their performance stats are team dependent. And, unlike skaters, it's a lot harder to put their output in context of team effects - for example, a PPG skater on an offensively challenged team tells you something. Or a guy with a -2 rating on a club that's -30 at ES also tells you something. But, it's hard to say to what a degree a goalie's lackluster stats are his or his teams in isolation. Especially when it comes to lower leagues like the AHL and Junior where stuff like ES SV%, PK SV%, SQN% (shot quality neutral SV%) and quality of shots against aren't available.

Leland Iriving was the Flames first round pick in 2006. He had a decent Junior career, although he played in very friendly circumstances: his WHL squad (Everett Silvertips) was one of the best teams in the league in terms of deterring goals against.

Over at Jonathan's place, Irving was brought up and JW mentioned his stats so far this year look fairly decent. It occurred to me that I had no context in which to place Irving's rookie efforts, so I decided to look up some comparable from the big leagues to see where he placed.

Problem being, not a lot of NHL guys played in the AHL as a 20 year old. Some were in other leagues across the pond, some were still in college and some had already made the dance. Let's work with what we ahve and see where he lands anyways...

First, though, let's compare Irving to his teammates. That is, the other guys who have played goal for the QC Flames this year:

Leland Irving: 44GP, 2.26 GAA, 0.912 SV%
Matt Keetley: 32GP, 2.84 GAA, 0.893 SV%
Kevin Lalande: 6GP, 1.92 GAA, 0.929 SV%

Irving took over the #1 job from Keetley a couple months into the season and has been the farm club's starter since. Lalande's results are excellent, but sullied by a small sample size (although, he's putting up similar numbers for the Syracuse Crunch since he was dealt). Both Lalande and Keetley are older than Irving as well (by one and two years respectively). Curtis MceLhinney's rookie AHL SV% was also .912, although he was older at the time (having come via the college route).

Now, here's Irving's 20 year old AHL season as compared to some existing NHL 'tenders.



Some guys played more games than others in the above comparison. Ward, for example, played 50 games for the Lowell Lock Monsters in 04/05. Halak, in contrast, played just 13 games in 05/06 for Hamilton.

The obvious caveats aside, this comparison seems to speak somewhat favorably of Irving. He's not in the realm of Ward or Lehtonen, but he's ahead of guys like Budaj and Raycroft. That said, his results thus far don't suggest an elite ceiling to me. his .912 SV% is slightly above the mean (.910) of the guys mentioned.

Finally, here's Iriving results relative to his draft cohort (only those with AHL results included):



This look isn't as encouraging. The three guys drafted in the first round with Irving are having better years in terms of SV% (Helenius, Varlamov and Bernier). Four other guys picked later than Irving (Mason, Dekanich, Atkoff and Enroth) are also ahead of Leland by this metric. His SV% is also slightly below the mean found here (.914). Of course, this comparison excludes guys who are still in lower leagues (NCAA, Junior, etc.) so at least it can be assumed that Irving is ahead of those guys.

Obviously, there's lots and lots of development time left for Irving so there's still tons of data to be yielded. However, looking at this first round draft pick right now elicits a big "meh" from me. Nothing suggests to me - again, as of right now - that Irving is necessarily Kiprusoff's heir apparent as the Flames future starter. His results so far look "good", but hardly elite. I'll leave it up to you to decide if that was worth a first rounder or not.