On the other hand, I've never heard a Grant Fuhr supporter use his regular-season save percentage as evidence for his greatness, so it's not too surprising that this metric does not fare him well.
Grant Fuhr supporters generally use one of these two arguments:
- Because of the style of play Fuhr's teams exhibited, Fuhr faced more difficult shots on goal than a typical NHL goaltender of the 1980s. His traditional statistics are therefore penalized.
- Fuhr played better in clutch situations than a typical NHL goaltender of the 1980s, an ability which is not reflected in his statistics.
I happen to believe point #1.
Warning - the remainder of this paragraph is my opinion only, and not based on any mathematics of any kind. If your team is in the other team's zone all day long, what kind of shots on goal are you going to face as a goaltender? Breakaways. Two-on-ones. Three-on-ones. I'm not suggesting that every single shot Fuhr faced was a breakaway - far from it - but I'm saying that it's reasonable to assume that he saw more tough shots than a typical NHL goaltender.
Point #2 I'm not a fan of. To my knowledge, it's never been looked at for goaltenders, but a lot of work has been done trying to find "clutch ability" in other sports. What has been found is that any "clutch ability" is washed out by the random noise.
What could be done is going through, game by game, and looking at situations which could be considered "clutch" to see if Fuhr performed any better than an average NHL netminder. I have not done this - I don't have anywhere near the resources available to do a task of this magnitude.
One thing that could be done is to look at Fuhr's game log on my website:
http://hockeygoalies.org/bio/fuhr.html
and see if he performed better in "big" games. You'd have to fairly define what you mean by "big" games, but it could be interesting to see if Fuhr did better than, say, Patrick Roy (
http://hockeygoalies.org/bio/roy.html).
As a way to end this post, I think we can all agree that playoff games are "big games". How did Fuhr do in the Stanley Cup playoffs?
Fuhr recorded an even 90.0% save percentage in his Stanley Cup career, with a league-average weighted save percentage of 89.5%. That gives him a goal differential of 17.63, meaning that Fuhr was almost 18 goals above average over his playoff career.
If Fuhr had played as well in the regular season as he did in the playoffs
(this is the same calculation I did a few posts back with Hasek and Emery in the 2006 playoffs), he would have been 95.33 goals above average. As mentioned above, Fuhr was actually 37.65 goals
below average over his NHL career, a difference of 133 goals. This is the best evidence that I know of that Fuhr was better in the big games.