This edition is a few days late, and I will endeavour not to let that happen again. Sometimes life gets in the way though, and these things do happen, so I appreciate your patience in waiting for the update.

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There is always a lot of fluctuation when it comes to goalies. Linus Ullmark is making a Vezina case, and his $5 million contract doesn't look bad at all nowadays. Meanwhile, Jack Campbell has that same $5 million price tag, but hasn't adjusted well at all to the EDM defence. It may be in the second half, or it may be next season, but he should turn things around and get back to his career norm (around a 2.66 GAA and a .915 save percentage).

Up at the top of the rankings though, Logan Thompson is just breaking the roof off of rankings system. He forced me to make a few adjustments to the formulas, which pulled him back a little. He's still waivers exempt, and at the beginning of the year I thought he was going to be sent down once Laurent Brossoit was healthy. He is never getting sent down again, and he is going to be given opportunities as a starter for at least the next decade.

Other goalies on good teams have seen their stocks increase the most, such as Alexandar Georgiev, and Vitek Vanecek. Spencer Knight is one of the biggest risers, but there are two reasons he's not as valuable as Thompson right now, and those are Sergei Bobrovsky, and Knight's impending extension. The good news about Knight's cap hit rising to $4.5 million next season though, is that it will likely force Florida's hand to move out Bobrovsky, making Knight the undisputed starter on a playoff team. He's also still only 21 years old!

Standard pre-rankings note:

This isn't meant to be a be-all and end-all rating system for you to use without thinking and just trade your players for anyone above them on the list that you can find, but used with some foresight for managing salaries. Cap hit is used for the player cost, so if your league uses salary or AAV, please account for that, as it can greatly change the impact of rookies. The rankings are set up so as to provide the most value in the current season, while providing some value in future years, based on modeling for predicted salary increases and production growth.

The stats used for the goaltenders attempt to balance both ratio stats as well as volume. For those of you with variations towards either end of the spectrum, leaning more towards volume or rate stats, you will want to account for that change in value. Same thing goes for setting variations such as: number of teams, salary space, or roster positions. This list is made to be a baseline guide for player evaluation, and to promote discussion and understanding of how to optimize rosters in a cap league setting.

The goalie list comes not only with a rankings system, but with value tiers. The tiers (also computed by a formula of mine) represent a more general view on a goalie's value taking into account a few overarching factors. Cheap backups can have higher ratings but show up lower down the tier rankings. The high ranking is due to their low cap hits coupled with an established floor with some possible upside. The lower tier is a result of them having uncertain volume, and the lower likelihood of hitting their upside in any given year. In general, aim to have the highest rated players if you are looking to be most cap efficient, but use the tiers if you just want to focus on having the best goalies and you are comfortable paying a little more for that security (my preference is usually to lean towards the more cap efficient options because of how variable goalies can be).

If you note a mistake, or have any further questions about the ranking system, please let me know. You can find me on Twitter here @alexdmaclean.

Comments help with optimizing the values, because they're not perfect and they never will be.

We're sticking with the +/- 5.0 rating that Dobber uses on all of his rating schemes as the range for approximately equivalent value. The skater and goalie rankings are synched so that the value of a skater against a goalie can be compared, though the scale of the ratings has changed a little since the last update.