Winnipeg Jets 2013-14 Goaltender Optimization

Claude Noel had an interesting quote today about Ondrej Pavelec; not an abnormal quote but a good introduction to the subject at hand. Noel mentioned that he plans to make decisions day by day, when all indications are this is not the best route. Last season Noel played out the season like this and –as noted in Arctic Ice Hockey twice– it hurt our team goals against and that could have been one of the major reasons why the Jets didn't make it into the playoffs.

Cam Charron mentioned in the first article linked how trying to play the hot hand doesn't historically work and the best method is having goaltenders essentially scheduled a head of time, with obviously minor adjustments when needed. So, we will conduct a bit of an experiment for fun. We'll make an optimized schedule for goaltenders using historical performance as a guideline and at the end of the year we'll compare this to the end results.

We already looked how both Pavelec performed similar to expected last season based on rest days.

This pattern isn't unique to Pavelec but true of all goaltenders. If we want to look at an updated historical data for Ondrej Pavelec and Al Montoya it looks like this:

From this information we can determine that the optimal days would be:

So, let's now make our optimized schedule and compare the schedules hypothetical results versus last years 0.904 Sv%:

An optimized schedule was actually already provided to me by HFBoards member "Sixty Minute Man" and I just made some tweaks.

Now you may notice there is a LOT of Pavelec in this list, and he's unlikely to be starting this much. At 71 starts it is possible that Pavelec could start tiring out. You could place Montoya into the sections where Pavelec is playing a block of multiple single day rest games and there wouldn't be a huge difference.

Obviously things happen (like injuries, fatigue, etc) but it will be interesting to compare to the actual results at the end of the season.

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