Is Olie a Playoff Goalie?

For those of you too impatient to run through statistics or read my methodology to come this conclusion: The answer is yes.

Alan Ryder, (His website, Hockey Analytics, is here) the closest thing to a Sabermetrics expert for hockey around, wrote a great article this past April about playoff goaltending that got me thinking about Olie and the playoffs, given that the Caps have a legitimate chance this year.

Ryder has explored whether there really is such a thing as a playoff goalie, and the stats pretty much back him up. Ryder looked at the two Stanley Cup finalists for the past fifteen years and found that the goaltender of the Cup winning team saw a .019 improvement from his career regular season SV% to his Cup winning playoff performance. In other words, as Ryder points out, they got “hot” for the playoffs beyond the trend of steady performce year after year in the regular season.

For the runners-up there was an average of a .009 improvement in playoff performance over career SV%, but there were 5 goalies out of 15 years that underperformed their career numbers and their teams paid the price. Olie was not one of the 5.

Some quick notes before I explain the numbers:
SV% is the only stat a goalie truly owns, unlike GAA, which really is an indicator of defensive unit as a whole. With SV% it doesn’t matter what the defense did, the goalie either stopped whatever came at him or he didn’t, period.

To refine the data a little bit I used Kolzig’s numbers from 1994 to the present for the NHL only.
Unfortunately it has been awhile since the Caps made the playoffs so there is a little less clarity for this analysis than for most of the other teams in the league. Still the .910 SV% from last year is comforting.

So here is the verdict:
From 1994 to now Olie’s average regular season SV% is .906. and his average playoff SV% .918 a .012 improvement from regular seaon to playoffs.

On average, the Stanley Cup winning goaltender saw a single season improvement of .019 from career and regular season SV% to playoff SV% in what we could call the “hot streak percent."

With an improvement of .012 in the playoffs since 94, Kolzig comes alive in the playoffs and wouldn’t need that great an improvement ( only .001) in his career playoff SV% to put him in that statistical band that helps lead a team to the Cup.

Let’s just hope the Caps can get him there.