Introduction

Ever since I can remember I have been passionate about hockey, and in particular goaltending. Growing up my position of choice in our local street hockey games was in front of the net. I'd use some old padding I had found somewhere if we played with hard plastic orange road balls or actually hockey pucks, or go without it when we chose to play with tennis balls. I loved keeping the puck/ball out of the net, and contributing to a win.

As I grew older I stopped playing but my love of hockey continued, and I combined it with my interest in analyzing statistics. I'd keep large spreadsheets for season and playoff performances and update them after each season had finished. I still do that now, and I do it for hockey, as well as my other passion, baseball. 

Baseball is much more of an individual sport than hockey, and as such it is a lot easier to separate out individual from team performances. So my files on baseball stats, for both pitchers and hitters, have grown a lot more complex as the range of stats for this sport has grown over the years. 

The hockey spreadsheets, on the other hand, have always been pretty simple. Games played, goals, assists, points, penalty minutes, maybe some rate stats on each, that has always been about it. For the goalies maybe a bit more - win percentage, save percentage. 

Now there is a better stat for goalies, called GSAx. The statistic has been developed and applied to all goaltenders going back to the 2007-08 (or 2008) season. In this blog I will analyze GSAx as both a counting stat and as well as a rate stat, and also write a bit about the goalies that have shown the best career and annual performances since the inception of GSAx.

More coming soon.