Why NHL save percentages have been declining for a decade

There has never been a coaching strategy so thoroughly defeated as “shoot from everywhere.” My playing career wrapped up in about 2009, and to the very end I came across coaches who still preached some variation of it. “Let’s just get as many pucks to the net as we can” probably made sense to them, as most of my coaches played their hockey in the late-1980s and early-1990s, before goalies started to look like transformers.

In 1997 the NHL’s league-wide save percentage rose above .900 for the first time since 1972 and it wouldn’t look back, climbing steadily until 2016 when it topped out at a high of .915.

Below is a look at what the league-wide save percentage has done in the decade since.

Today, the league-wide save percentage is the lowest it’s been in 30 years, when the 1993-94 season saw goalies finish with a collective .895.

Like the wolf and the coyote, goalies and skaters remain a part of the same genus, but stopped evolving as part of the same species long ago. 

Goaltending got so good for so long because it evolved ahead of player shooting, to the point it hurt the fan experience of the game. The league was posting soccer scores, and when a team fell behind by two goals they were pretty much dead to rights regardless of how much game time was left. That last note should be a feather in the cap of the goaltending union.

They kept a small, frozen object that goes 100 miles per hour and bounces in unpredictable ways out of the net with such alarming consistency that the league had to change rules to help players score. They basically beat the game.

Those evolutions all seemed to happen at roughly the same time, didn’t they? Goalies starting being selected more for their size, the equipment got cartoonishly large, and they simultaneously figured out that bigger netminders could become “blockers” rather than reactionary athletes. The onus was suddenly on skaters to make perfect shots. Patrick Roy and Martin Brodeur were pioneers.

Goalies adapted blocking game plans based on the percentages. The thinking became that when the puck does X, they should do Y. It felt like the goalie union came to collectively believe “If the player can make a perfect shot, we’ll concede that goal, but they usually can’t.”

As goaltending underwent those changes, most skaters had grown up using wooden or two-piece sticks and made the transition to one-pieces part-way through their pro careers. Most of us didn’t know how to make the original Easton Synergy sticks do anything all that special except break. The flex most players chose was still somewhere between oak and rebar, and while some could certainly hit it hard, few could both hit it hard and place it on the same shot.

Alex Ovechkin became a harbinger of the shooters to come.

These days, just about everyone in the NHL can rip it roughly where they want. Meantime, goaltending equipment has been reined in, and several rule tweaks have been implemented to encourage more goals, from the introduction of the trapezoid to restricting players from changing after an icing. Power play opportunities are at their highest levels in over 10 years, too.

But more than anything, today’s players have come up using one-piece sticks and shooting on goalies whose plan has still largely seemed to be about playing big, executing the strategy, and being content with allowing a perfect shot to go in. Those same goalie strategies have been around since modern stars were little kids, and so today's shooters know where the goalie is asking them to make their “perfect shots” without so much as looking up.

Not that today’s players look down all that often, anyway.

These days, skaters know that if they come down the wing low below the faceoff dot, goaltenders will hug the post in their Reverse VH (one pad vertically against the post, the other horizontal down low), and that a high shot on net from there has a chance to go in.

They also know that most goalies are going to angle their head in a way that they can probably bank a shot off it and in. Jack Hughes sure does.

What all this means is that players have given up on the idea that “any shot is a good shot.” Even those low angle shots are only taken because they have a legitimate chance of going in.

The NHL is full of huge goaltenders who are the best in the world at executing their goaltending strategies. They make extremely few mistakes, and so a shot from distance is essentially a turnover. One fun stat from a recent Steve Valiquette interview on Real Kyper and Bourne was that last season John Tavares took more than 140 low danger shots and he scored on...one of them. I can’t imagine the stats are much different for your average shooter in the league.

This all brings me to a detail from a more recent Valiquette interview, where he noted the data from his company, Clear Sight Analytics, shows a connection to low danger shots and losing. Teams have the highest winning percentage when they get seven or more high danger shots, while at the same time taking 12 or fewer low danger shots.

While it’s certainly not a solution on its own, the data showed teams that take just 0-9 low danger shots in a game win 60 per cent of the time, while teams that get up around 23-25 win just 33 per cent of the time. You end up keeping the opposing goalie warm and engaged, and essentially create turnovers via bad shots. You go from having solid possession to a whistle, or possibly to the other team having the puck.

These are the type of shots where today’s goaltenders are more solid than they've ever been. Shooters seem to be adapting to the death of the “shoot from anywhere” strategy, and so it looks like teams are taking fewer total shots, but perhaps are instead looking for the best ones.

There could very well be other causes for that decline -- if it’s even statistically significant -- but it sure runs coincidentally hand-in-hand with Vally’s numbers showing the learned uselessness of low danger shots.

You can see how the reliance on pure execution can handcuff goalies who are less reactionary and more about save selection. If you pick the wrong one it can hurt you, and what’s happened this year is the reverse VH (RVH) is getting picked apart.

When a puck goes low in the offensive zone to a dead angle where a player really can’t score (except for Hughes apparently), that’s typically when goalies drop into their RVH. But they can't move as well out from that position. So, what's happening, is teams are seemingly being able to find more plays getting the puck from the "dead angle" player to one in the slot who can fire off a quick, high shot. This “low bumper to high player” shot saw an increase in usage last season and resulted in 116 goals over the first three weeks in 2023-24, according to Clear Sight. This season, those plays have connected for 134 goals over the same time frame.

The greater point here for me, is that the goaltending species of hockey player deviated from the player branch about 30 years ago. They got bigger, more positional and more strategic in the way they took away net, while skaters lagged behind.

But more recently, player shooting has evolved and their understanding of how modern goaltenders operate has grown, too. Almost without looking, they can better guess the parts of the net that are taken away, based on where they have the puck on the rink.

"The goalies are as good as they have ever been, but part of it is that goaltending is very optimized now," said former goalie Mike McKenna. "You can beat all of the goaltenders in a very similar fashion. There is no more need to cater to specific goaltenders like it used to be 10 or 15 years ago."

Goaltending is getting harder to evaluate, as individuals play fewer and fewer games each season (with a number of teams having a trio of goalies they like), and so some randomness over those games can lead to great and/or awful numbers for very comparable play. They mostly kinda seem…the same. It’s almost like no goalie plays enough to get in much of a rhythm, which is understandable given the taxing nature of the up/downs that come with the position, and the pressure that puts on the knees of some very big people.

This has probably put the goaltending position in a fun spot if you’re a fan of the game. Most goaltenders I talk to feel RVH is too heavily relied upon, and shooters have gotten so good that we could see a rise in more athletic, reactionary goaltending. You can’t just be on tracks anymore.

Some of the best goalies in the league can scramble and battle, from Connor Hellebuyck to Andrei Vasilevskiy to Igor Shesterkin and beyond. There’s a balance to strike in positional versus athletic play, and the best have found a way to do it well.

For now, the balance of power seems to have tipped in the favour of shooters, as save percentage league-wide plummets. But the evolution always comes, so you best believe the goaltender union will have an answer for goal scorers in the seasons ahead.

Just what exactly that answer is remains to be seen.