We are back this week to finish our MVP series. We have completed reviews for centers, right and left wingers, and defensemen. Today we will be moving on to goalies.

The process will be much the same as with skater articles, though using different categories and scoring metrics. 'Most Valuable' is a tricky term that is going to be completely dependent on the league-specific context. For the purposes of this article, we are going to use standard Yahoo point scoring to calculate the total fantasy points for each player. This year the stats include wins, shutouts, saves, and goals against. Obviously, this means there might be some general deviations to your league, based on your settings, but it is at least a good starting point. In order to grab all of this data I am exporting the Goalie Big Board Report for the full season, and doing a bit of rearranging so I can have only the pertinent fields.

The table below contains the top five total fantasy producers in goal for the 23-24 season. We start with basic player information on the left (name, team, and total games) then get into some production stats (wins, save percentage, goals against average, and quality start percentage), and finally average draft position and Yahoo standard league fantasy points.

First up, who were the top five goalies this year?

There are some very familiar names here. Connor Hellebuyck, Juuse Saros, and Igor Shesterkin would have been favorites preseason to make this list. Before moving on too quickly though we do have to just note the value Hellebuyck brought to his managers in 2023-24. He is a full 100 fantasy points above second place. That gap is just enormous. If we put in a 30-game threshold to account for less active goalies in our percentage stats Hellebuyck ranks first in save percentage, second in wins, second in quality start percentage and third in saves (and games played though these are obviously linked). He certainly was an early goalie drafted but provided top notch value through the season.

The other name I wanted to touch on here (don't worry we will get to Jordan Binnington in a second) is Sergei Bobrovsky. Bob was the third ranked goalie by these metrics and did it with his highest games played since 2018-19, his highest save percentage since 2017-18, his highest quality start percentage since 2016-17, and highest goals saved above average number since 2017-18. Basically 2023-24 was his best season in Florida. You know his age-35 season, five years into his contract, just like we all predicted. Good thing he has a couple of more seasons, I guess?

Moving on to the value part of the equation. This explanation remains the same from the previous articles, so I have included it again for quick reference:

In addition to total fantasy points I have also pulled average draft position data (ADP). These ADPs are based on preseason drafts so don't take into account leagues and drafts that started part way through the season. The idea here is that if we compare the draft position to the end of year fantasy points for all players, we can get an equation that lets us say, 'on average a player with X draft position would be expected to get Y fantasy points'. Once we have that we can compare that expected number to the player's actual number and see who performed the best based on their draft position. The ADP data below is compiled (averaged) from ESPN, Yahoo, and Fantrax ADPs for the 2023-24 season.

Our next table contains the players who provided the most value once we account for where they were drafted. I have included their ADP data, the fantasy points that were expected given that ADP and then the difference between those numbers.

The most valuable goalie by this definition was… drum roll please… Petr Mrazek? His ADP is so low we could probably just consider him not drafted. But I suppose since someone did actually draft him, we should talk about the season he had. Mrazek played 56 games, the highest of his career. That workload certainly made him worth a look, but Chicago was going to be awful so conventional wisdom would have implied we stay away. But somehow he was not terrible. He got the volume, he was above 50 percent quality starts, had an actually ok save percentage. How ok? For comparison, some notable names with worse save percentages include Juuse Saros, Jake Oettinger, Andrei Vasilevskiy, Stuart Skinner, Tristan Jarry, and Filip Gustavsson.

Ok, finally, Jordan Binnington. Binnington has historically been all over the place. He has a good stretch and then loses the job. Has a great year, and then loses the job. Somehow in 2023-24 he not only kept the job the whole season, but actually played pretty well. It was easily his best season since 2019-20. Across the board – games played, wins, save percentage, quality starts, goals saved above average, no matter where you look – Binnington put up career highs or near career highs. As always though, inconsistency is the name of the game so I certainly can't say that there has been a new leaf turned for Binnington.

Now we move on to the least valuable. These guys all underperformed their draft slot by significant margins.

So clearly a lot of this is table comes down to games played but I decided not to filter it as heavily as the forwards because for goalies a lot of times games played comes down to value to the team and not necessarily injury. Pheonix Copley and Ville Husso missed time to injury so clearly that impacted their value, but honestly it is not clear that being available for games would have led to more starts. We can maybe give Husso a little more leeway, he was closer to a .900 save percentage, but he certainly was not good. Copley was just plain bad in the games he did get.

It would be nice if we could find some reason for optimism here, but both Akira Schmid and Jack Campbell were given at least one change and essentially played themselves out of relevance on their respective teams. All of these guys had early opportunities, and were drafted on that potential upside, but they all failed to deliver pretty dramatically.

Finally, Devon Levi. He is slightly different in that he is the young future of the franchise who actually managed to be not great, but at least not as awful as the rest of this list. He had by far the best quality start percentage, and the best overall save percentage. Still his wasn't great and didn't take the reins as we hoped he might during draft day. He still has plenty of time to round into form though, so this isn't as dire a situation as some of the others.

Finally, I will wrap the column with a few names. These are the guys who weren't drafted but provided the most fantasy points.

This is a fun list. Four of these guys are goalies who managed a serious run as their team's starter even though they started the season as a backup. All four were a combination of outplaying their respective starters plus being helped along by an injury. Joey Daccord probably wouldn't have seen a ton a time without an injury to Philip Grubauer, but the others were showing flashes of promise and competing for starts even prior to any of their startings missing time.

Mackenzie Blackwood is very much in the Petr Mrazek category, playing surprisingly ok on a very bad team. His save percentage is not quite as good, but his quality start number was still over 50 percent. He did miss some time so would have seen larger season value without those injuries. When he was available though he had some surprisingly valuable stretches.

That is all for this week.

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