🏒 Can you spot future stars in net? NHL teams no longer think so
🏒 Can you spot future stars in net? NHL teams no longer think so
My Week in Sport(s): goalies in hockey, goalies at Euro 2024 and Jonquel Jones
Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.
In this edition:
🏒 Goalies slipping out of the first round at the NHL Draft
⚽️ Goalkeeping performance at the European Championships
🏀 Jonquel Jones, the Liberty’s under-appreciated star
🏒 Can you spot future stars in net? NHL teams no longer think so
In one of the first editions of Plot the Ball this year, I looked at how far away we are from having public statistics in football which accurately capture how good goalkeepers are at stopping shots.
The ability to prevent goals in net is obviously the most important way in which keepers provide value to their teams — but there are other ways they can contribute, too.
Earlier this season, Oliver Walker broke those other components down in an excellent piece of analysis for StatsBomb:
You’re unlikely to make it as an elite goalkeeper if you can’t stop shots at least passably well; but, once you hit a certain baseline in that area, some teams might decide that the other things you bring to the table are valuable enough to select you over more effective shot-stoppers.
Man City, for example, have enough financial heft that they could go after almost any player in world football.
But their men’s team has stuck with Ederson in goal for a number of seasons, in spite of his average shot-stopping numbers, because of his ability to play out from the back in possession under pressure1.
I’ve been watching and thinking about ice hockey a fair amount since writing that piece in January, as well as football.
And I might find the position of goalie in that sport even more perplexing2.
The sheer volume of shots faced3 in a single game by an NHL goaltender can lead to some really odd outcomes over small samples — as we’ve seen in the recently concluded Stanley Cup Playoffs.
The Youngren twins — creators of the advanced statistics website Evolving Hockey — summed it up nicely in a recent post:
And this isn’t something that necessarily rights itself over a complete season either.
As this end-of-year wrap-up by Micah Blake McCurdy of HockeyViz shows, the variation in outcomes between regular NHL goalies can be huge4.
It’s interesting to compare the position in ice hockey to football in a couple of other ways, too.
As it tends to be a much more transition-focused sport, there is no real possibility of a goalie making a career in the NHL because of the value they add with their passing in possession.
There is no Ederson of ice hockey; NHL goalies live and die by their shot-stopping skills alone.
On the other hand, they are the only player who is on the ice for the entirety of the game — which should theoretically give them a much greater opportunity to add value5.
When they are making decisions about how to construct their rosters, however, NHL teams don’t think that this guarantee of more playing time each night is enough to outweigh the inherent uncertainty and volatility of the core skill of goaltending.
The 2024 NHL Draft is taking place this weekend — and, if you look back over the last couple of decades of teams’ selections, you can see a clear shift in how goalies have been evaluated.
In the 12 editions of the draft between 2000 and 2011, 24 top-30 picks were used on goalies — including a pair of first-overall picks, and seven selections in total inside the top 10.
In the 12 completed editions since 2012, only eight have been selected in the top 30 of the draft — and not a single goalie has gone in the top 10.
In short, teams are happy to shop outside the top 30 for NHL-calibre goalies — in a way that they aren’t for skaters, despite having more spots on the ice to fill.
If you consider the aggregate number of career games played by NHL skaters selected within the first 210 picks since 2000, those drafted inside the top 30 contribute 47% of the total.
For goalies, that figure drops all the way down to 25% — with second-rounders over this period contributing 20% of NHL games played, and third-rounders contributing a further 22%.
What’s interesting is that, as the league as a whole cools on using higher draft picks on goalies, the risk to any individual team of going against that trend increases.
A decision to select a goalie in the first round is also a decision to forgo selecting a skater at the top — and to try your luck later in the draft instead.
But the chart above suggests that the value curve for those position groups drops off much more steeply as you progress through the draft than it does for goalies.
of Unexpected Points consistently makes this argument regarding the NFL Draft, bundling positions on the field into tiers by their relative value:At time of writing, it doesn’t look like this broad trend is going to change in 2024. Not a single goalie appears in the final first-round mock drafts published by The Athletic, ESPN and TSN this week.
And it’s hard to blame teams for this given how volatile goalies performances are, and how much value is available at the position later in the draft.
If you take one thing away from this newsletter this year, it should probably be this: the person in net is pretty consistently the hardest player on the field — or the rink — to analyse.
⚽️ Run the Numbers
Over the short timeframe of an international football tournament, how well opponents finish their shots — and how well your goalkeeper reacts to them — can have an outsize effect on how your games turn out.
Thanks to Opta and FBref, we have a number of advanced statistics readily available to assess how teams are doing in these two aspects of the game at major competitions like Euro 2024.
That short timeframe means that the data you have access to is pretty limited, though — and the performance of the Spanish men’s team in the recently completed group stage of the European Championship is a handy cautionary tale.
In aggregate, Spain have probably been fortunate to turn good underlying defensive performance into great defensive outcomes so far6. Has this been poor finishing?
Not at first glance, per Opta’s numbers: their group-stage opponents turned aggregate (pre-shot) xG of 2.7 into 3.3 post-shot expected goals. Their goalies Unai Simón and David Raya seem to have done a good job between them so far, then.
But going back to the video complicates things. 1.9 of the 3.3 PSxG they have faced came from just two shots taken by Croatia against Simón — and I’ll let you decide yourself whether this header by Andrej Kramarić, with Simón’s left hand inches in front of his face, really had a 90% chance of ending up in the net7.
Maybe Simón’s presence in goal will be a real advantage for Spain in the latter stages of the tournament; after all, he’s coming off a great year in La Liga for Athletic Club. I wouldn’t make that judgement based on his Euro 2024 performance to date, though.
Heading into the knockout rounds, it’s much safer to trust your prior assessment of goalie skill than to put your faith in numbers that — over stretches of a handful of games — might not be as robust as they appear.
🏀 Watch the Games
Outside of Caitlin Clark’s Indiana Fever, the New York Liberty are the WNBA team I’ve watched the most of so far this season — and I’ve developed a real soft spot for the style of basketball they play.
Breanna Stewart — featured in this section of the newsletter last month — has serious perimeter skills, and is one of the reasons why the Liberty are able to funnel a lot of their half-court possession through their bigs operating in space.
The other reason is Jonquel Jones.
The Bahamian has a WNBA MVP award to her name, and respected statistical sources have her as one of the league’s best players again this season — but she doesn’t get the attention she deserves8.
Sabrina Ionescu has great chemistry with Stewart, but watch any of the Liberty guard’s highlight reels and you’ll consistently see excellent plays from Jones to facilitate her scoring too.
One characteristic combination goes as follows. Ionescu sprints around the top of the three-point line towards Jones, who is holding the ball and facing towards her own basket; Jones hands the ball off to her teammate as she passes by, and deftly moves her feet so that she can crush Ionescu’s defender with an impermeable screen; Ionescu calmly takes an unguarded three-point attempt.
That’s exactly how it went late in the second quarter of the Liberty’s win over the Atlanta Dream last Sunday, with Ionescu moving from left to right and sinking the three to extend their team’s lead to 21 points.
The guard ultimately gets credit for the basket — but it’s made that much easier by the ball-handling ability and physicality of Jones.
You can watch a clip of this sequence here.
The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published on Saturday July 6th.
He has conceded goals almost exactly in line with the post-shot expected goals he has faced since 2017-18, per FBref; per StatsBomb, he completes his passes significantly more frequently than expected under pressure — and excels at making line-breaking passes to teammates in space.
In combination with the other ways in which stopping a puck differs from stopping a football; trying “[t]o keep track of opponents and teammates and the tiny black puck that are all zooming around the rink”, as puts it, likely requires very different approaches to perception and movement.
Above McCurdy’s cut-off of 41 expected goals faced in net, some goalies conceded actual goals equivalent to around 75% of their xG — while the rate for others was as high as around 125%.
They are the only country to have made it through their group without conceding a single goal — but seven countries have conceded fewer expected goals across their three group games, and four have conceded fewer non-penalty expected goals.
It’s fair to say that the penalty saved by Simón — well struck towards the corner — was a much better executed shot, but I struggle to believe that any spot kick hit at that height is really a 99% chance in post-shot terms.
She was ranked fifth in Kevin Pelton’s recently published Wins Above Replacement Player leaderboard — but came in 15th in the first round of fan voting for the WNBA All-Star Game.