The Giants in the Crease Goalie Cards

It’s been a minute since I’ve written one of these articles so if you manage to make it through this first sentence we’re on the right track! As you may have seen on Twitter Giants in the Crease is starting to dip our toe into different aspects of goaltending/hockey. Most recently was an expansion into the Viz portion of hockey stats/analytics which you can find here. Now though it’s time to take another step into trying to give goalies the due they deserve with goalie cards!

What are goalie cards you ask? Well the idea was inspired (or probably stolen) by the cards JFresh does for the NHL. There are essentially none though for women’s hockey and the few that are out there are skater focused. Goalies are once again left in our little space in the crease forgotten about. But no one puts tendy in a corner and that’s why Giants in the Crease is deciding to go this route.

Next step of course is how is this going to work or what’s the process for people to see these goalie cards? Well to the dismay of those interested they’re only going to be available on request or when there’s time/opportunity to churn some out. The groundwork has been laid for the three women’s hockey leagues to be at the start of this process: the PHF, the SDHL….and the CWHL. That’s right folks the CWHL is back on the hockey stats menu! There’s a few reasons to go this route such as women’s hockey is often such a backburner priority for so many people these goalies deserve to be at the forefront for once and they probably have the easiest/simplest data sets to work with.

If you’ve noticed on the Giants in the Crease tableau page stats are kept for a variety of leagues in both men’s and women’s hockey. So yes there will be cards for the AHL, OHL, QMJHL, WHL, NHL, the women’s WHC and Olympics. This is just the very start of a rather large project that is going to be growing bigger as time goes on. No one is getting left out, just want to do this right and take advantage of whatever data is available. Also not a completely patient person and the fact that time is being taken to do this article should be considered a miracle!

Deciphering the Goalie Cards

So when looking at these goalie cards you’ll notice a fair amount of information, abbreviations, and numbers. Of course if you’ve never seen these or aren’t big into the stats community you’ll be wondering what are you looking at exactly? Very fair question and I was in the same boat the first time I saw the JFresh player cards. You can get the general idea that blue is good, red is bad, the range in between means average or average-ish. The general info the top corner is pretty easy to understand as it's just laid out the way it’s meant to be understood. Where the confusion will start to kick in is what are the categories and what’s with the numbers?

The top four categories are Quality Start %, Really Bad Starts, Goals Saved Above Average, and Goals Saved Above Average per 30 Shots Against. These are the stats that are deemed to be more goalie effected or that the goalie has more control over. The bottom four stat categories are Starts, Points %, Shots Against per 60 minutes, and Shutouts. These ones are together because they are generally more team effected though shutouts is there mostly because it fits there a bit more than with the four stats above.

For those that don’t completely understand what these categories are or just forget (and honestly can’t blame you) here’s a quick refresher:

Quality Starts % (QS%): Is the simple equation of Quality Starts divided by Games Started. Quality Starts are when a goalie posts a Save Percentage equal to or above the league average SV% or posts a Replacement SV% while only allowing two goals against

Really Bad Starts (RBS): Is when a goalie posts a SV% at a certain threshold below the league average SV% which statistically leads to the fewest amount of games won. The more of these the less chances your team has to win

Goals Saved Above Average (GSAA): Using the league average SV%, the goals and shots against of a goalie an equation is put together to figure out how many a goals were saved compared to a goalie who would be league average statistically

Goals Saved Above Average Per 30 Shots Against (GSAA/30): It’s simply taking the GSAA of a goalie and seeing what the number would be per every 30 shots against. The idea is that the average goalie sees about 30 shots a game so this helps to normalize everyone’s GSAA especially when comparing over different seasons where the league average SV% fluctuates

Starts: It’s how many times a goalie is in net to start a game

Points %: It’s the amount of points (two points for a win, one point for an overtime loss usually) a goalie’s team earns with them in net divided by the amount of points the could have possibly gotten

Shots Against per 60 Minutes: It’s how many shots against a goalie sees during the course of 60 minutes because that’s typically how long your average hockey game is

Shutouts: When the goalie allows zero goals and is the only goalie to have played that game

The last and final step is understanding what the numbers mean. When you see the GSAA number is 90% for example what does it mean? All the numbers you’ll see for all these statistical categories is the Percentile. This is just saying that compared to historical numbers the goalie had a GSAA better than 90% of goalies that meet the threshold for being included in these numbers to take out really weird outliers (usually capped at 10 starts). Now below are going to be some graphs so it’s a bit easier to understand what a 90 Percentile goalie looks like compared to a 30 Percentile goalie in GSAA, GSAA/30, QS%, SA/60.

Thank you all for whoever has made it this far and is ready to embark upon this journey of looking at the present as well as the past. As mentioned above these three leagues are just a step towards a lot more goalie content that gets more in-depth as the stats allow. Lastly there have been a few questions as to where this work can be financially supported so I’ve set up a PayPal where if you want to toss a few bucks it’s all appreciated (just to reiterate Goalie Card requests are FREE) and can potentially help to increase the betterment of this work!