I took a tiny break from the Free Agency madness to flip through Alan Ryder's voluminous year in review (found via Brodeur is a Fraud). I've only skimmed over it's 50 some pdf pages, but the section on goaltending really caught my eye:
Isolating shots and shot quality lets one better assess goaltending. The impact of goaltending is highest when a strong goalie allows ‘few’ goals notwithstanding a high number of shots faced and / or shots of high quality.
...
Calgary suffers from goaltending delusions. The Flames remember Kiprusoff as he was. His goals against average (the second most useless statistic in hockey) is trimmed by good defensive play. His play has been going downhill for a couple of years now.
Ryder's analysis shows that Calgary a.) didn't really have that bad of defensive team last year and b.) they suffered from some rather awful goaltending. Not "pretty bad" relative to Kipper's previous stellar contributions, but bad in an absolute sense, ie; league performance. In fact, the Flames had the 5th worst goaltending by Ryder's Marginal Goals metric - ahead of only Tampa Bay, Carolina, Columbus, Washington and Tampa Bay (no wonder the SE is so bad). The reason this is so disconcerting as a Flames fan is it's been happening for awhile, as Ryder points out.
(-30) Kiprusoff has gone from a save percentage of .923 in 2006 to
.917 in 2007 to .906 in 2008.
That's from his "biggest swings in goaltending" section. And if his analysis in the the 2008 review can be trusted, Kippers deterioration can't be laid at the feet of team effects.
Kiprusoff is poised to make 8M in real cash next year and his cap-hit balloons to 5.83M. If his notable decline isn't halted - indeed, reversed - none of the other things Sutter is currently doing wont matter all that much. The Flames will likely be on the outside looking in come April. I half-jokingly made a suggestion that Sutter deal Kipper at the deadline last February with his decline and impending raise in mind...it seems even less ridiculous now. Hopefully the quiet Finn rebounds and proves me wrong though.
I haven't looked in depth at Ryder's data, but take a gander yourself if you're so inclined. It's certainly not all bad news either: some of Ryder's work reveals just how good Jarome Iginla and Damond Langkow are.
