THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

On a semi-related note, I’ve long wondered about the effictiveness of pulling a starting goalie who has let in multiple goals.  Is there any research on the subject?

Tom,

I found in past that there isn’t a very strong aging curve for goaltenders.  Their careers length tends to be four years regardless of when they broke in to the league.  I’m sure a lot of that is due to observation error - even a great goalie is bound to have a horrible stretch, and that’s perceived to be his true talent rather than luck and so another goalie gets a chance.

This should be the same as with relievers: mostly, you’ll better off with just taking next one from the farm when the current one starts getting expensive, but sometimes
a) you have noone, so you have to pay somebody FA money,
b) you have exceptional goalie (Hashek, Roy, Miller, Luongo, Brodeur,...)
The trick is to know when you have someone who has had great season or two, and when someone extraordinary.
Also, great goalie is really helpful in post-season, and established goalie is less likely to have really poor season (at least, that is “common wisdom"). Many teams would prefer to play $3M goalie who will probably have .920 save percentage, and almost certainly between .910 and .930, than $.5M rookie who can be just as good as that veteran, but may post .880. That usually destroys the season and gets GM fired, specially if he had a chance to sign the veteran and decided not to.
Does anyone have data: how many goalies have made their first 35+ start season in the last 10 or 20 years because they got the starting job at the beginning of the season, and how many because starting goalie was ineffective or injured? Also, I would like to see it split by good teams/bad teams (proxy can be previous year’s playoffs yes/no). I would guess that fringe playoff contenders and those who aren’t contenders give starting jobs to rookies relatively often, but teams that are counting on making playoffs almost never.

This makes what is going on with the Blackhawks right now really interesting. Cristobal Huet is, generally, terrible. The numbers support him being not very good, but he fails the eye test big time. Conversely, Antti Niemi has been mostly exceptional when he’s gotten a shot.

Yet, Joel Quenneville (who I think is a very good coach, for what that’s worth) gives Huet - the veteran with a history of sometimes being pretty good - a very long leash. Niemi can play great for 3 or 4 games, but if he lets in a couple goals (even ones that aren’t bad goals) in a game, he gets pulled and Huet is again the starter.

While I don’t know this to be true, I think it’s a certainty that if both goalies were making the same amount of money, Niemi would be getting most of the starts and Huet would be relegated to taking the second game of a back-to-back.

The real test will come this offseason: If the Blackhawks have a chance to move Huet, for well-publicized cap reasons, they must even if they don’t get a goalie in return. But will they? Or will the “certainty” of Huet be too much to pass up when Niemi, while excellent this year, is still just a rookie and mostly unproven?

Davor, since you brought it up, Niemi has (I think) 22 starts this year. He almost certainly won’t reach 35, but for a team that has hopes of a Cup, that’s quite a few.

JD, I said 35 starts, because that should mean that backup has taken the job from the starter, at least for a part of the season. Niemi is still used as a backup.
This is like with Detroit after Hashek first time - they signed big name, though it was low probability he would be better than average. Part of the reason was that Detroit historically had problems developing goalies and didn’t want to risk .880 sv% from rookie. Many clubs do the same, even though, on average, they could get equal or better performance from rookies than non-elite veterans.
Part of the reason is risk aversion, but another part may be that with really bad goalie (sub-.900 sv%) teams may play different, uncertain, more cautious, so the performance drops considerably more than mere goalie stats would indicate (my observation, someone would need to check the data).

JD - funny you mention the Hawks, there was a whole thing on Fanhouse about Chicago, and one of the articles was about the goalies.  The real secret to Huet this year is that he only faces 23.5 shots per game, a truly tiny number.  Even an average workload would expose him.  But Quenneville’s stuck: they couldn’t risk going with Niemi full-time because if it blew up on them, the old guard would wail about rookies not being clutch, and playoff experience, and it could get the poor guy sacked.

The funny thing is that Huet doesn’t have any playoff success thus far.  Small sample size and all, but he’s 0-3 in playoff rounds.  His regular career numbers are more solid (excepting this season), led the league in saves percentage once, and the old guard usually wails about that sort of thing too.

I wonder how hard the Hawks tried to move him for a cheaper option, or whether they just shrugged and said to themselves that it worked for Ozzie in Detroit, so they can pull it off too.

nightfly, what’s interesting about the situation to me is that even the “old guard” in Chicago (I’m talking fans and some media) seems to want Huet to sit down for an extended period to see what Niemi can do. Now, I don’t think a coach should make a decision based on public opinion. He needs to do what he thinks is best. But I’m not sure conventional wisdom applies here since the overwhelming opinion is that Niemi needs to at least get a chance.

Are there any reliable, decent numbers on “soft” goals? That seems a bit too subjective to accurately document.