When NHL Goalies have their Peak Seasons and the Length of their Primes

The state of the NHL goalie is extremely complex and mysterious. The way we view the position, it feels is evolving faster than the game itself, in the last ten years we have seen the deployment of goalies change drastically, tandems or even trios are more common, it has been drilled into our minds that goalies need more development in the minors than a traditional player, and it feels to me that even the consistency amongst the elite goalies from year to year is more sporadic than ever. In this article I have taken the last 20 full NHL seasons of goalie data and am going to assess when NHL goalies are peaking in their career and what effectively is their 'prime'.

Peak Seasons

To start I took all the goalies in this sample and distribute their peak seasons by goals against average and save percentage over age. This will help indentify typically at what season goalies are having their best season of their career.

GAA

The first thing that stands out is of our sample that varies from ages 18-42 how young the peak GAA age is. Given how it is commonly viewed goalies need a long time to develop and adjust to the NHL game, I was extremely surprised to see how young the peak GAA season was occuring at and it was not particulartly close. In the sample 54 goalies at age 23 had their best GAA season with the next closest ages being at 24 and 26 years old each with 39 goalies respectively. 93 of the 398 goalies (23%) had their peak season at 23 or 24 years old making that two year combination by far the most likely to see your goalies best season. So we are ready to pull all our goalies out of the minors and start them this year right? It is not that simple.

The issue with looking at it this way is around the age 23 is when many goalies are making their debut season. As we know many goalies debut in the NHL, but not many stick around and have long careers. Due to this we are heavily overcounting goalies in those younger years because that is simply their only season or two they played in the NHL so one of those seasons has to be the 'best'. To better analyze this we are now going to look at all goalies who played at minimum 5 seasons and better understand when longer tenured NHL goalies actually peak.

This greatly reduces our sample to 156 goalies and we see a much different view as when a goalie peaks GAA wise. The most frequent age for a goalie to peak in GAA that plays at minimum 5 NHL seasons is 26 years old with 17 of them doing so. The group from 25-28 years old encompasses nearly 40% of this sample for when a goalie will peak based off GAA. What is interesting though is how we see 23 years old still right up there amongst the leaders and then a huge drop off at 24. This is showing that we have removed a large sample size of all the goalies who made their debut at 23 and then fell off a cliff in their age 24 season and were out of the league soon after. One final side note, Dominik Hasek having a GAA of 2.05 in his age 41 season is absolutely nuts. The only goalie older to play in this span was EBUG legend David Ayers at age 42.

Save Percentage

Cutting right down to the minumum five years played sample and looking at it based off save percetange the results almost mirror what we saw for GAA, however their was a tie at the top with age 25 and 27 seasons both having 17 goalies have their best SV% season then.

Peak Seasons Summarized

For NHL goalies that are going to have a career less than 5 seasons you will likely see them debut around age 23, have their best season then and then quickly fall out of the league. For a long term NHL goalie you are likely to see their best season occur for GAA and SV% somewhere between the age of 25 and 28 with the most likely season being at age 25. Now that we know which age year goalies are most likely to peak it begs the question of how long will a goalie be good for?

Performance by Age

When looking at goalie performance across age we are going to go back up to the full sample of 398 goalies as these metrics will be the average of all sampled goalies at that age. This will be more representative of how the average goalie performs at that age in the NHL.

GAA

One should start looking at this chart from the two sides looking in. On each end of the age axis you will notice how wildly sporadic the GAA is, when you have really young or really old goalies it is a wildly varying bag of results. Narrowing your focus on the window that extends from ages 23-33 we see a more consistent average GAA and it is also hovering around the lowest GAA of any age on the chart. The 18 year old numbers are so low due to a singular Olivier Michaud shutout in 2002. I don't even know who that is, but he is probably never letting people live it down that he got a shutout as an 18 year old.

SV%

For the most part this is a very similair as GAA, but I'd argue there is a little more longevity to the quality save percentage numbers ranging from ages 24-35 and once again it is very sporadic on either end. The one unique thing about looking at the average save percentages is between every year in the black window we observe a change in direction. Goalies are not consistently getting better or worse in that age range. This is a very important oberservation in todays NHL, not even the elite of the elite goalies are just a sure thing in their prime every year. Think of the struggles Sergei Bobrovsky went through before rediscovering his game in 2023. Look at Andre Vasilevsky this year, while his numbers were still decent and he was coming off injury, he still posted a career worst SV% and GAA at the age of 30. Jake Oettinger just also psoted his worst career season with his save percentage dropping .014 points and his GAA rising .35 at the age of 25. Now these are by no means bad seasons, but even when a goalie is in their prime, you are going to have some considerable variability from year to year. This probably is why we often do not see massive long term contracts shelled out to goalies (It sometimes still happens).

Performance by Age Final Thoughts

Just like the hockey stereotype of goalies being weird, so can be understanding their careers. You likely can expect a goalie with a long term NHL career to have their best season at the age of 25 and their primes to be between the ages of 24-33. Even though a goalie may be in their prime it is not smooth sailing as year to year goalies often bounce up and down statistically. As the NHL evolves more into a goaltending by commitee league it is going to be interesting to see if goalie stats rise due to reduced workloads and also how GM's handle tying up term and cap into quality goalies.

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Date: 2024-09-02