Fan vs Fan

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Flyers Goaltending Fun

Honestly, I'm sorry I don't update as often as I should here...but hopefully there's a few of you who keep coming back and hoping for new content.

I was on Hockey-Reference earlier to look up one thing, and I got bored and ended up looking up another...and I found something interesting...

The Flyers goalie carousel wasn't a problem.

Yes, the Flyers have had a revolving door of goalies post lockout and pre-Bryz with 11 goaltenders playing a game per hockey reference.

But, I learned something as well...





I took the numbers of the clear cut starting goalies on the list which was, for this experiment, defined as anyone with 42 or more games played, so Biron's 1 to Niity's 6, and took the combined Save % of these goalies which is .908


So then I added up the games played of those goalies and got 328, so I did another search another on hockey reference and found a list of goalies who played in the same or more games with an equal or greater SV% and I got this list...





12 Goalies would be an improvement over the Flyers situation in the same sample size. Just twelve. And guess what, the Flyers current starting goaltender is Ilya Bryzgalov and he posted a .915SV% over the same time period which ranks him nicely between Ryan Miller and Martin Brodeur with ~80 fewer games played over the same time period.



What I gathered from this piece is quite simple- the Flyers goaltending situation should regress based on math going forward, Bryz's bad season was a fluke and he's going to get better.