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Le Pac’s Cartoons: Goaltending, Not a Problem

Last month we introduced a new feature to Arctic Ice Hockey, hockey cartoons.

As a Chicago Blackhawks fan, Le Pac often illustrates on subjects related to the Hawks. But as a member of Conference III (AKA Central Division) and access to twitter, he also has a large amount of Winnipeg Jets exposure to draw from. Speaking of which, feel free to follow him on twitter here.

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Garret's take and some links to past AIH articles:

Long-time readers of Arctic Ice Hockey should be very familiar with the concept of the Winnipeg Jets true anchor. The Jets goaltending, specifically Ondrej Pavelec, has been a touchy subject since year one.

In June 2012, we wrote that Pavelec was not let down by his team and speculated how much he was actually worth for his new contract.

One new contract and another year later, we wrote a myth buster piece on many of the misconceptions of Pavelec's performance and goaltending in general, we tested the significance of team effects on save percentage, and agreed with Noel that Pavelec was not a top 25 goaltender. With all this information, we were confident in saying that we were right a year earlier when claiming Pavelec was not worth his contract.

We were tired of the subject and avoided it as much as possible. Still, another year showed no change to Pavelec's performance. After abstaining from as much comment as possible, we were forced to comment at the years end. We noted starter goaltending as the primary issue for the Jets goals against, and reviewed Pavelec's seasonal performance relative to his peers.

All-in-all, the anchor effect can be simply seen by looking at the difference between Jets 2.0 goal differential and shot differential relative to league average:

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Left y-axis is for shot differential (purple) and goal differential (green). Right y-axis is for shooting percentage (blue) and opponents' shooting percentage (100 – (save percentage x 100), red).

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