Does a goalie get better with more shots faced

An article by Alain Haché, Ph.D and Pierre P. Ferguson, M.Sc from the physics of hockey website discussed how a goalie does when faced with a lot of shots.

For a 20-30 shot game a goalie does not get weaker as he faces more shots, in fact the goalie's save percentage goes up the more shots he faces up to a certain number. So the question then becomes is it better for a team to let its goalie face more shots in order to have a higher save percentage? Well even though a goalie's save percentage from 20 shots to 30 shots increases by 0.007 percent; from their charting of the data 10 more shots means one more goal per game. So even though the percentage goes up so does the number of goals.

Key to Success for a Goalie

Live Science did an article about Canadian scientists finding the exact spots a goalie needs to watch to block a shot. Since a puck in flight moves too fast for the eye to track, where the goalie focuses his eye before taking action is crucial. Using headgear and cameras the scientists had the best goalies from Calgary schools face the best shooters on their team. 75% of the time elite goalies focused on the puck a full second before the shot. 25% of the time they focused on the ice in front of the stick, only 2% focused on the body of the shooter. Novice goalies tend to be looking all over the place and have a much lower save percentage. So focus training as well as technique can be incorporated into a goalie's training to improve their game. Here is a link to the full article.

http://www.livescience.com/health/061026_hockey_goalie.html

Goalie top draft picks not so successful

Nice article on Hockey or Die on the lack of success when picking a goalie as a top draft pick.

success rate low


For the 9 top ten picks of goalie only 3 have played more than 500 games at the NHL level. So that makes the success rate only 33%. It does seem that hockey is not unique in this respect, as of the 43 first round quarterback picks by NFL teams only 13 have been successful for a rate of 30%.

What is weirder is even though the Canadian Major Jr league is heavily scouted, the success rate has not been that great, here is the chart from Hockey or Die

League	# of Picks	lt 100	100GP	500+GP	Success Rate
Major Jr.	66	11	16	39	59.1%
Everywhere Else	34	2	7	25	73.5%