This newsletter is all about different perspectives and appreciating the beauty of there being no right answer in a lot of hockey conversations. However, there are some things we actually can all agree on, and one of them is that goalies are weird.

Everything about them is weird.

How they dress. How they act. How they train. How we evaluate them. How we talk about them. But within that weirdness, there’s legitimate game-breaking potential, and for some of us (not trying to point fingers, but ohmygodme!!!), trying to understand that potential in all of its beauty and frustration is unbelievably hard.

Goaltending in the modern NHL has changed a lot, and every day I go back and forth between whether or not goaltending is more important than it has ever been, or if it’s the most expendable position on your team.

So today, we’re going to talk about goalies in all of their weirdness, and try to (not) answer the question: is a good goalie in the NHL overrated or underrated?

I’ve been on a YouTube video essay kick lately. It’s getting really bad.

But amid all of the videos about shape theory in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, there’s been some helpful work stuff, I promise. Harman Dayal put out a really great project about goaltending that broke down some interesting research about how, in the modern NHL, there’s little correlation between how much teams spend on their goalies and the performance they get out of them, both over a full season and in pressure-cooker situations.

I’ve historically been fairly anti-goalie tandem. I remember when Linus Ullmark and Jeremy Swayman stole the hearts of hockey fans everywhere, and a lot of discussion began around how tandems may be the way of the future.

The way I saw it was that you can play a whole season with two goalies. Say Team A runs a tandem where each guy gets 35-50 starts, and each guy gives you a 50-60% chance of winning. Then Team B runs more of a traditional starter/backup situation, where your starter gives you a 75% chance of winning and your backup gives you a 25% chance of winning.

Over the full NHL season, Team A probably ends up with more wins. However, when it really comes down to it, only one goaltender can play a game. So my preference was always to have the highest-ceiling goaltender on my team and deal with the consequences of the 30 regular-season games that came with a non-tandem-worthy backup’s minutes.

But honestly, guys? I’m starting to wonder if that thinking is flawed in real-world execution.

I stand by it in theory, but that “guaranteed 75%-win-rate” goalie doesn’t exist in reality.

Even the league’s best goalies have variance, and through dud playoff performances or long stretches of injuries, we’ve seen that having that elite goaltender — who often is accompanied by a crazy price tag — doesn’t actually give you that implied win probability you might’ve expected it to when you signed him.

In preparation for this newsletter, I went back and listened to a few of Kevin Woodley’s episodes on the PDOcast because he does such a compelling job of convincing me that all goalies are absolutely amazing at what they do.

I don’t think that’s what he’s trying to do, but if it is, it’s working.

Something he’s always quick to point out in his work is this, but more eloquently: much like how we can’t compare player contract clauses and AAVs in today’s NHL to deals signed during the Obama administration, we can’t compare post-Covid goalie stats to even prime Lundqvist/Price days.

Ten years ago, league average save percentage was .915. You could almost win a Vezina with that now! Skaters are becoming much more selective with their shots — we’ve talked about this in previous newsletters, but between the way we count/record shots now, the technology that’s available for coaches to evaluate their games and adjust going forward, and shooters redefining goal-scoring entering the league seemingly every year… goalies’ jobs have never been harder.

Maybe it’s the empath in me, but the all-too-frequent disregard for the game’s evolution, as well as the fact that goalies are players too, and certain players perform better in certain environments, has me wondering if we’re sometimes looking at “goalies” too holistically and forgetting that they’re individual athletes who exist and perform in varied contexts.

An added layer of what’s weird about goalies is that in execution, most of their job is just reacting to other people’s jobs. They’re truly at the mercy of what offensive strategy is being deployed and how the defense in front of them is responding to it. Sure, if the playbook on a certain goalie is that they’re significantly weaker when facing certain types of shots, then the offense might be tweaking their game to outmatch the goaltender’s, but usually, shooters shoot, and goalies goalie.

As Hot Garbage Sports astutely points out in this video, goaltending is the only position in the game that can’t create more than it gives up. Goalies can absolutely outperform expectations, but at the end of the day, their job is about prevention, not creation.

Unless you’re Igor Shesterkin. On pace for a 20-goal season before the injury. #divadown

Because of this, it’s so freakin’ difficult to attribute certain wins, statistics, and outcomes to an individual goaltender. Think about Connor Hellebuyck, the most recent goalie to win a Hart Trophy. In 2024-25, he won the league MVP and, of course, the Vezina. In that year, the Winnipeg Jets also won the President’s Trophy (most points in the NHL) and the Jennings Trophy (fewest goals scored against them).

Connor Hellebuyck had an amazing campaign. He also had the 4th-highest expected save percentage of every goalie who played over 15 games. Do you know who had the highest? His backup, Eric Comrie. Hellebuyck (.955) and Comrie (.957)’s expected SV%s are products of the defensive environment they played in. How much of that environment is cultivated because the team knows they have strong goaltending behind them?

It’s very chicken/egg, but in the same way that I often say “show me a Jack Adams candidate and I’ll show you a good goalie”, I can also say “show me a good goaltender and I’ll show you a lot of good stuff that exists around him.”

It’s not up to me to decide who’s the cause of what, but I just think it’s worth pointing out.

If you’re Canadian, you’ll know all too well that high-end goalies don’t grow on trees. If you’re American or Russian, you’re probably laughing. Damn you and all your men’s hockey goalie riches.

It’s been well-documented that no one, from fan to front office, seems to know how to value goaltending properly. We see skewed trade packages, contract structures, and draft strategies all the time, and they differ based on what lunar cycle we’re in and what side of the bed we woke up on.

Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug, and hockey teams fall victim to it all the time. It’s hard as hell to acquire and develop elite goalies. In just this newsletter alone, I’ve identified so many reasons why goaltending investments are risky. So if you can’t get one, why not find solace in all of the data out there that suggests you might not need one anyway?

The reality is, the Tampa Bay Lightning won back-to-back Stanley Cups with Andrei Vasilevskiy in net, and in one of those years, he won the Conn Smythe. The Bolts were a great hockey team, but they don’t win those Cups without him. Jonathan Quick was a key part of the Los Angeles Kings’ 2010s dominance, winning two Stanley Cups and being named a Vezina finalist twice.

Good goalies exist. Good goalie performances win games all the time, and what are championships if not a string of won games all coming at the right time?

Predictive patterns are important. Stats are real. But someone has to win every lottery. People defy odds every day. You have to be good to be lucky, so shouldn’t you want your goalie to be good?

I don’t know what the next wave of goaltending will look like in the NHL.

I don’t know what threads of trends we’re seeing right now that are most likely to get pulled on.

I don’t know what storylines are red herring outliers, and which ones are indicators of what’s to come.

After all, aren’t goalies just weird, and that’s the whole point?

Thanks for reading and we’ll see you again real soon.