The goaltender is a gamble.
The 2015-16 Montreal Canadiens crumbled when their Hart Trophy winner left the lineup. The San Jose Sharks soared when they secured the Los Angeles Kings’ backup, but only after he was passed on by the Boston Bruins.
When constructing hockey teams, GMs can often do little more than shake their heads and make educated guesses in net.
And as a fantasy GM, you can take some cues from the suits when determining how to treat the most valuable position on the ice.
But first—and this should go without saying for any strategy you plan to employ—understand your specific pool’s scoring system to get a handle on how heavily the goaltender’s performance is weighted. Some of these rules may change if, for instance, your pool only counts ratios and ignores wins, or vice versa.
Assuming all categories are (mostly) equal, here’s where you begin: Make like a real NHL GM and stop drafting a goaltender in Round 1—or Round 2, for that matter.
Here are three critical trends at play in the use of NHL goaltenders that should cause you to adjust your draft strategy—as well as the method you use to make mid-season roster tweaks.
1. Specific goalies are less important, which makes the true elite even more important
For the most part, goaltenders can be lumped into tiers, and the elite group atop the heap are the clear No. 1 workhorses—invaluable, but rare to both fantasy GMs and their real-life counterparts.
You don’t have to be the poolie who starts the goalie rush, but you’d best secure a backbone to build your team from the net out. It’s a big enough cluster that you should be able to snatch one, probably in Round 3 of your draft.
Don’t fret if someone else rushes to take Carey Price or Braden Holtby early.
If you’re able to secure one of Ben Bishop, Henrik Lundqvist, Tuukka Rask, Martin Jones, Corey Crawford, Pekka Rinne, Jonathan Quick, Cory Schneider, Roberto Luongo, Jake Allen, Brian Elliott or even Devan Dubnyk, you’ll be fine. (Until this spring, we would’ve included Pittsburgh’s Marc-André Fleury in this pack, but with the emergence of Matt Murray, the future of “The Flower” is unclear.)
The reason that group is so congested is because teams’ use of their clear starters has changed. In the good ol’ days, before coaches were so concerned with proper rest and back-to-backs and saving a premium goalie for a long playoff run, it wasn’t uncommon to have a couple of goalies with 70 individual starts. In his heyday, Martin Brodeur did it routinely.
In the past three seasons, no goalie reached the 70-start plateau. Vezina winner Holtby topped them all with 68 last season, and Washington faced questions about overusing their star during the regular season. In 2015–16, only 10 teams gave 60 starts to one guy.
Another nine teams had one netminder start between 50 and 59 games. This group includes second-tier options like Cam Ward, Cam Talbot, Semyon Varlamov and Ryan Miller—decent goalies, but inconsistent in their play and labouring for teams that didn’t rack up the Ws.
Due to inconsistent play, itchy trigger fingers and frequent injuries, an incredible seven teams used four different goalies last season: Columbus, Buffalo, Arizona, Calgary, Colorado, Ottawa and the Islanders. St. Louis and Montreal used five apiece.
We’re not just saying that things have changed in the 20 years since Grant Fuhr played 79 games for the Blues, all in form-fitting equipment. We’re talking about a gradual but noticeable shift during this decade. Five seasons ago, the NHL had three goaltenders with 70 or more starts, 13 with 60 or more, 24 with 50 or more, and only four teams used four goalies.
Clubs have placed a stronger emphasis on team defence, managing own-zone risk and implementing cohesive systems—all of which are sucking scoring out of the game. In placing an emphasis on six-man net protection, individual virtuoso goalie performances are, generally, less relied upon, and the mid- and lower-tier goalies have become more interchangeable.
All of which illustrates the core point: Aside from the established Vezina threats, the position is in flux more than ever. So, as a poolie, you need to anchor your lineup.
2. Build a group, not just a duo
Because of those aforementioned injuries and goalie carousels and the difficulty of predicting 2017’s breakout netminders, if your pool’s point structure favours goaltenders—and many weekly formats award four categories to the guys in pads—you should plan to take at least a third goaltender, and maybe a fourth, in the final rounds of your draft.
The uncertainty around the crease of the Sabres (Buffalo had one 40-start goalie and two 20-start goalies last season), Stars, Islanders, Ducks, Flames and Hurricanes should push you to consider their best goaltenders as tier-two or tier-three options.
It’s in these late rounds that you should consider diving into the teams that employ tandems or protect-by-committee approaches. Pluck an up-and-comer from this group—i.e. one who should get more starts in 2016–17—like Murray, Thomas Greiss or Brian Elliott, and you could strike gold with your backup goaltender slot.
Say Cam Ward tears his groin, Carolina’s young defence corps takes another giant step forward, and Eddie Lack is sitting on your bench. Suddenly, Lack holds solid value. When the first major goaltending injury strikes (hopefully not to your team), you can use Jimmy Howard or Antti Niemi as a bargaining chip in a trade. Half-decent forwards are always available on the waiver wire, but healthy goalies evaporate quickly. This is where you can use that extra security blanket, or force a team that doesn’t have one to pay dearly for it.
Just ask the phony GM who went all-in on Price last season how he did in his pool, especially if he was unable to pull Mike Condon and salvage his initial hot streak. Depth is the antidote to injury.
3. Watch for the guy nobody sees coming
Unless you’re Jim Nill in Dallas spending $10.4 million for the tandem of Antti Niemi and Kari Lehtonen, the backup goalie position is not valued in dollars and cents. It’s frequently filled as a roster afterthought by an inexperienced youngster you can only hope catches fire for a while (Louis Domingue) or a great-in-the-room veteran who’s capable of fill-in duty but happy to work cheaply and won’t ruffle the starter’s feathers (Scott Darling).
Yet the importance of the backup is sky-high.
The already-intense workload in the NHL will increase in 2016-17 as the schedule was truncated to accommodate September’s World Cup of Hockey. This season, each team will receive a bye week with zero games, a concession by the league to the Players’ Association in return for agreeing to a three-on-three All-Star Game. This means more back-to-back games and three-in-four-days bursts, which in turn should see coaches lean more frequently on their No. 2s as they try to avoid injury and fatigue to their studs.
Hockey players have never been so well-conditioned, but the speed, brutality and intensity of the game keeps creating injuries.
For the first time since 1980, all eight goalies appeared for the four teams in the conference finals. The Eastern Conference final was decided by the goalie duel between Murray and Andrei Vasilevskiy—both of whom were on few fantasy squads at the start of the season.
Don’t get too attached to your roster—especially your second and third goalies. Bail and jump on the hot hand. Embrace the randomness of goalie roulette. The keyboard jockeys who grabbed fantasy dreams Dubnyk and Andrew Hammond in 2014-15 certainly didn’t regret it.
On the ice and in pools, the goalie game is all about starts and opportunity. So who will be that sneaky-good guy who sees a giant leap in starts in 2016–17? Carter Hutton perhaps? James Reimer? Vasilevskiy? Jacob Markstrom? Connor Hellebuyck? Maybe. But it’s probably some American Hockey Leaguer you’ve barely heard of. So you better pay attention.
