Rob introduces Quality Starts and the league’s most consistent goaltenders.

Quality Starts

At last, your fantasy hockey leagues have an alternative to goalie wins and losses: quality starts. No longer can your netminder earn fantasy points merely for playing on a good team with lots of goal support, because quality starts can only be earned when he plays well enough for an average team to win.

Quality starts have actually been around since 2009, but were only available at the end of the season in year-end publications like Hockey Prospectus. Now, at least, they’re available on a real-time basis courtesy of Hockey Reference.

"We’ve added four new measures to goalies on Hockey-Reference.com, Games Started, Quality Starts, Quality Start Percentage, Really Bad Starts. These should be available anywhere you see goalie stats on the site currently, including the Play Indexes." – Hans Van Slooten

Yes, that also means that the new goaltending data goes all the back to 2007-08 season, when Martin Brodeur recorded the unmatched feat of 50 quality starts.

Leader Board

According to the latest data on Hockey Reference, this year’s leader is Pekka Rinne, by some margin. He’s already got 20 quality starts, well ahead of second-place Braden Holtby, who has 15 in 22 starts. Here’s a look at the top 10, just prior to the start of last night’s games.

Goalie           Team GS QS QS%

Pekka Rinne       NSH 23 20 87.0%

Corey Crawford    CHI 18 14 77.8%

Jaroslav Halak    NYI 19 13 68.4%

Braden Holtby     WSH 22 15 68.2%

Jonathan Quick    LA  21 14 66.7%

Ben Bishop        TB  22 14 63.6%

Jonathan Bernier  TOR 19 12 63.2%

Ondrej Pavelec    WPG 21 13 61.9%

Marc-Andre Fleury PIT 18 11 61.1%

Frederik Andersen ANA 23 14 60.9%

Minimum 15 starts

Quality starts adds a brand new dimension to fantasy hockey, adding a key category to the goaltending pool that isn’t subject to factors outside their control, like how good the team is offensive or defensively, nor how much goal support they receive.

Some History

As I wrote in last year’s Hockey Abstract, forget evaluating goalies based on wins and losses. That’s over! If the starting goalie stops at least a league average number of shots in a particular game, assuming he was sufficiently tested, then that’s all that can be fairly expected of him.