My favourite part about the goalie rankings is that I managed to automate the tier and the rating system independently, and they work to show different things. The tier system will likely show you the goalies in an order much closer to how they are likely to be drafted, or valued by your fellow fans and fantasy GMs.

At the moment, the top-ranked goalie by the rating system is still only in tier-three. That's mainly because Logan Thompson is an unproven rookie, and we haven't seen how well he holds up over the course of a season, and whether he can come back in October with a workhorse-starter mindset, and still produce the same results. We have also seen Jeremy Swayman produce excellent results on his ELC, though it is uncertain whether he can wrestle the starter's job away from Linus Ullmark.

On the flip side, we see tier-one goalies sliding down the ratings list, as their bigger contracts allow less room for them to out-perform their pay. These players are tested, generally on good teams, and are a lot less prone to bad starts and bad seasons. That is worth a lot in a draft or in a trade, but over the course of the season it does mean that there is a lot less upside for your fantasy team.

Depending on what goaltending stats you're looking for, either percentages or volume, you will be looking for different things at this point in the year. If it's just percentages, you're gravitating to the goalies on better teams, with Martin Jones, Vitek Vanecek, and Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen seeing their stocks increase from the start of the year. If you're looking for volume, all three of those are still good, but when you just need volume and you can forego the percentages, there are usually cheaper options to acquire. Carter Hart, Petr Mrazek, and James Reimer are all options to look at, and now you can also look towards Anton Forsberg with Cam Talbot getting injured yesterday, there is always a goalie solution for a reasonable price.

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.