Two observations

I know, but his stats aren’t half bad, and it’s more telling than saying “every cup contender had strong centers”.

Those 20.7 saves were from an average of about 25 I believe. Not the greatest numbers.

i wonder if the economic downturn will bite altitude? i’d love to see the whole thing written off as a failure and Haynes can go back to radio where he really shines, McNabb could actually use his deep hockey knowledge and not verbally fellate every hockey player in sight, and in general we get real coverage again. I watch hockey games on mute these days.

First a centers stats aren’t really as relient on his teammates as a goalies. I had a game on sunday which we lost 8-6 or something, and 6 of the goals were scored by 1 player. His stats didn’t have a whole lot to do with teammates as he managed to get the puck and fly throuh our poor excuse for a defense. He had a lot of good quality scoring chances where I was hung out to dry by my D. His stats look good because HE was good. My stats look crap through a combination of my 6 month old, figured out by myself skills and our crappy D. If our D was was actually playing D then my stats would look slightly better. His team may as well not have been there and his stats still look good.

As for your Conference Defenses argument I agree to an extent, but you’ll still have teams that are mainly D like detroit that win because they limit quality shots and you’ll have teams like Pittsburgh whose D isn’t as good and relies more on their offense and Goaltenders standing on thier head to win.

Of course center stats are tied to his teammates, and yes Goalie stats can indicate which goalies are keeping their teams in games (for example, Mike Smith of Tampa) but if you look at the worst Save % of goalies with over 25 starts, most goalies either play on offensive minded teams who give upo a lot of odd man rushes the other way (Theo) but score a lot of goals to make up for it, or bad teams (Isles, Avs, Predators, Stars, Blues) or sucky goalies (Osgood). Are those teams bad because of their goalies, or are those goalie stats bad because of their teams? It’s impossible to say, especially with a stat like Save % because it doesn’t normalize itself over the quality of teammates.

I think we can all safely say that any team that gets to the conference finals has a proper defense and there’ll be not that much difference in the quality of shots given up by either of the teams, otherwise they wouldn’t have gotten that far.

I don’t agree with this at all. Especially in a small sample size of the playoffs, the sample size is so small that a team with a previously bad defense could play above their head for 8 games (all it takes to get there) and since they only play 2 teams before the conference finals it is highly dependent on the style of the teams they play against.

It’s not about making an argument bulletproof it’s about understanding the biases and flaws in a statistic before taking it as gospel. Shot quality does not normalize itself out over the course of the season… For example:

Brett Clark blocks a lot of shots, but he also puts himself in vulnerable positions by attempting to block shots sometimes. so he takes away a lot of shots (which is a good thing) but when it backfires the opponent is more likely to get a higher quality shot. This has the added benefit of keeping easier shots off the goalies stat sheet, and giving up higher quality shots (i.e. more goals relative to shots on goal) further reducing Avs goalies save %. While Clark’s shotblocking is good for the team in most cases it adds a bias into the Save % numbers which doesn’t average itself out over time.

This is just a more extreme of many factors that can bias a Save % over the course of a season, one that a goalie has no control over.