We have been following the playoffs for the last several weeks here at Frozen Tool Forensics and I wanted to continue that trend this week. So far we looked at potential targets in the Play-In rounds, some of the results of the Play-Ins, and then some high performers from the teams that were eliminated (see links at the end). In each of these sections, we focused on the skaters, largely the forwards. Today I wanted to give the goalies their due and highlight a couple of current performances.

This week on Frozen Tool Forensics: Playoff Goalies

The process part here should be pretty familiar to anyone who has been reading through these columns. The Frozen Tools section allows us to pull the playoff data for this year in the drop-down column and then select goalies rather than skaters at the top. As we often do with the skaters we are going to focus on the Goalie Big Board report as it contains a good breadth of information that will allow us to do a couple of quick reviews.

First up – let's take a look at the goalies who are managing the largest workloads. If we sort by games played we will get a picture of essentially who is left in the playoffs as they are the ones who have played the most games.

Carey Price, Cam Talbot, Corey Crawford, and Joonas Korpisalo still make the top ten, but will quickly be left behind as the goalies in front of them play more games. One other interesting note here is that there is no Bruin or Avalanche goalie represented here (both of whom are still in the playoffs). It just highlights the storyline for Boston that Tukka Rask jumped ship earlier this month and Jaroslav Halak has had to step up. We can expect his name to rise in these standings if the Bruins keep winning. Over in Colorado neither Philipp Grubauer nor Pavel Françouz have maintained a starting job.

This relatively basic look doesn't really give us an understanding of the goalie's real workloads though. Once we separate it out by saves and assume a least four games played we get some interesting numbers.

In this list, we have the goalies with the top five shots against numbers per game. We might be tempted to think these numbers are high (which they are) but we also have to remember that some of these games are going into overtime (remember Korpisalo's 83-save game against the Lightning?). Big Board doesn't give us total time on ice and that is the stat we would really need if we wanted to compare these across players or to the regular season. But just for completion's sake here are the five with the lowest total shots per game against.

Four of the teams on this list are still in the playoffs (unsurprisingly). Colorado has clearly done an admirable job suppressing shots though. Their goalies have averaged about 24 shots against per game, while Darcy Kuemper over in Arizona is facing 37. Even if some of that is due to extended periods that difference is pretty stagering and leaves Colorado goalies with a lot more rest.

This brings us to performance. Big Board gives us a couple of ways to look at performance, I like Quality Start Percentage (QS%) and Save Percentages (SV%). To start with Quality Start Percentage we can take a look at the top five below (and yes I know thee are six but Carter Hart and Cam Talbot are tied).

It is a little surprising that two of the teams on this list are no longer in the playoffs, but I suppose it just means that goaltending was not necessarily the issue for their exit. I did briefly want to highlight Jacob Markstrom here. The guy has been incredible. An 83.3 QS% is amazing, over the largest game sample size in the playoffs and the fourth-highest per game average shot count against. Elias Pettersson has been electric and all, but without this guy, they aren't this far in the playoffs.

If we sort by save percentage, we really get a who's who of high-profile goalies who are no longer in the playoffs. Only Carter Hart makes this list and is still playing. If missing two teams from the QS list was surprising four of the five top-performing goalies in save percentage being out is also unusual. A couple of them are low sample sizes (Jake Allen and Frederik Andersen with five games) but not Price or Korpisalo.

On the flip side the below table is not surprising at all.

These goalies played poorly and all of their teams are out. At least there is only one goalie in our sample without a quality start to his name.

If we sort by save percentage:

These are some pretty brutal save percentages. I think we all expected a little better from St. Louis, Minnesota, and Nashville, even if not necessarily from the individual goalies. All small samples for sure, but they all played at least four games.

That is all for this week. Thanks for reading.

Stay safe out there.

Want more tool talk? Check out these recent Frozen Tool Forensics Posts.

Frozen Tool Forensics: Winners of the Losers

Frozen Tools Forensics: Stats from the first week of play-ins

Frozen Tools Forensics: Play-In Peak Performers