On Players Evaluation - Part V (Goaltender's Elo)

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV

The goalkeeper is half of the whole team

Soviet proverb from Lev Yashin's times.

After a foray into the calmer lands of teams' evaluation using the Elo rating, it's time to turn our attention to the really juicy stuff - the evaluation of a single player. And we'll start with the most important one - the goaltender. DISCLAIMER: this evaluation concept is still a work in progress and one of several possible implementations of the idea.

By coincidence, it's also the simplest evaluation to make. While many stats describe the performance of a skater (goals, assists, shots, hits, blocks, faceoff wins, etc. - and even one that is accounted usually for goaltenders) only one stat truly describe the goalie's performance: the saves percentage. Usually, whole four stats are used to compare the goalies: wins (W), saves percentage (SVP), goals against average (GAA) and shutouts (SHO), but will show you first, why three of them are mostly unnecessary. Also, the name saves percentage is a bit of a misnomer, since the values of svp are usually not multiplied by 100 to look like real percent, but are shown more frequently between 0 and 1, and therefore would be more properly named as 'Saves Ratio', or 'Saves Share'.

Wins are truly results of team efforts. I always cringe when I read that a goaltender "outdueled" his opponent, when the both barely got see each other. The GAA is much more of an indication of how well the defense operates in front of the goalie. Shootouts are first, and foremost, a very rare thing, and secondly a 15-save shootout should not be the same as 40-save shootout, although for any of the four stats listed above they create two identical entry.

Therefore we feel ourselves on a firm ground evaluating goalie's performance through SVP only (with a slight input from shootouts, as described below) - and the Elo function, of course. For the start, each goaltender is assigned an Elo rating of 2000 for his first career appearance. We discard performances in which goalies faced less than four shots, because these usually are late relief appearances in the garbage time, not really an evidence of goaltending in a true hockey game. We only account for them to display the real SVP accrued in the season so far, and we consider dropping these appearances completely.

After the game we get the pure SVP from the real time stats. We adjust it in two ways:

1. If, in the very rare case, the performance is below 0.7, we set it to 0.7 .
2. If there was a shootout (not the shootout as defined by the NHL, but a performance where a goaltender was on the ice for at least 3420 seconds and did not let a single goal in during that time), we add a shootout bonus for the performance:

Bonus = (Saves - 10) / 200

If there were less than fifteen saves in the shootout, the bonus is assigned the minimum value of 0.025. We consider adding this bonus necessary, because the opposing team is usually gives an extra effort to avoid being shut out even during the garbage time.

Then, given the actual performance we can calculate the "Elo performance rating":

R_perf = 2000 + (SVP - SVP_vsopp) * 5000

Where SVP_vsopp is the SVP against the opponent the goalie is facing - effectively the shooting % of that team minus the shots resulting in empty-net goals, sort of "Expected SVP against that opponent". That means that for every thousandth of the SVP above the expectation, the performance is five points above 2000 (the absolute average).

Wait, there seems to be an inconsistency. Don't we need ratings of opponents for Elo changes calculation? Actually, no. Given an Elo performance of a player, we can calculate the rating change as a "draw" against a virtual opponent with that Elo performance, i.e.

ΔR = K * (0.5 - 1 / ( 1 + 10 ** (( R_perf - R_g)/ 400)) ) )

Where K is the volatility factor mentioned in the earlier posts. Right now we are using the volatility factor of 32, but that may change - including introducing a dependency of this factor on goaltender's experience.

And the new rating, is naturally,

R_g' = R_g + ΔR

Now we can calculate the expected remaining svp:

SVP_rem = SVPav_g + (R_g' - 2000) / 5000

Where SVP_avg is the league average SVP. It would be more correct to substitute that value with the weighted averages of the remaining teams to face (with accordance to the matches remaining), and we'll be switching to this index soon.

We can also calculate the SVP expected from the goalie at the start of the season:

SVP_exp = SVP_avg0 + (R_g0 - 2000) / 5000

where SVP_avg0is the average SVP of the league during the previous season and the R_g0 is the rating of the goalie at the conclusion of the previous season (including playoffs), or the initial rating of 2000.

We post a weekly update on our Elo ratings for goaltenders, and their actual and expected SVPs on our Twitter feed. You can also access our daily stats on our website page.

It looks like we're ready to try to take on the skaters' performances. But I'm not sure it's going to fit into one posting.

To be continued...