HOH Top-40 Goalies Voter Record - ContrarianGoaltender

[seventieslord]

Round 1 List
http://web.archive.org/web/20161020185003/http://hfboards.hockeysfuture.com/showthread.php?t=1343493

Players on the top-40 not ranked:

None

Players on the top-40 ranked below #50:

None

Players exclusive to this list and no more than two others:

Sean Burke (36) – one of three
Dan Bouchard (37) – one of two
Gilles Meloche (52)
Mike Palmater (55)

Players ranked highest on this list:

Bernie Parent (5)
Roberto Luongo (25)
John Vanbiesbrouck (27)
Sean Burke (36)
Dan Bouchard (37)
Gilles Meloche (52)
Mike Palmater (55)

Players ranked lowest on this list:

Terry Sawchuk (9)
Miikka Kiprusoff (58)
Tomas Vokoun (60)

Note that Vokoun was only on 4 lists, so other participants ranked him even lower.

Round 2 voting record:

Round 2 participation record:

Click to read more...

 

[TheDevilMadeMe]

I know you explained Palmateer in the aggregate list thread, but curious to hear the reasoning behind some of the other high rankings (Burke, Bouchard, Meloche are the ones IDed as higher than anyone else).

I know you mentioned that you ranked Parent too high on your original list, but boy did your opinion of him drop like a rock. Interested to know your thought process there.

(By the way, I hope nobody gets offended by talking about the thought process that went into their list and votes - I think it is valuable to helping understand how our final list was put together. There are definitely some "weird" votes on my list too).

 

[kmad]

Kinda surprised someone had Parent higher than I did.

 

[ContrarianGoaltender]

I know you explained Palmateer in the aggregate list thread, but curious to hear the reasoning behind some of the other high rankings (Burke, Bouchard, Meloche are the ones IDed as higher than anyone else).

Bouchard and Burke rank 3rd and 5th in career GVT among all goalies who did not make our top 40. Neither of them played for a great team, and both of them solidly outplayed their backups at their peaks. Both of them were quite possibly also more talented than their records suggest. Burke was getting by mainly on his talent in his early career before he started to focus on his technique, and then put up terrific stats in the early '00s in a league environment that really suited big, blocking style butterfly goalies (unfortunately he just did it in the relative anonymity of Phoenix).

I've rated Bouchard pretty highly for a while based on his save percentage and record vs. backups. He was considered by a lot of observers (including Ken Dryden) to have all the talent in the world but one who struggled mentally at times. His playoff record was poor, both overall and when you look at high leverage situations, so there might be something to that, but I think his regular season success is pretty strong and I don't rate playoff performance as high as others here do.

Meloche is a goalie that has a lot of defenders who will say that he was as good as some of the guys on much better teams, but never got the accolades because he also played on bottom-feeders. I think those repots might be a bit overblown, it's actually hard to make the statistical case that he was among the very best in the league when comparing him to the other goalies he played with, at least for much of his career, but some of his seasons were very impressive.

Finally, all three of them have very good longevity, which just adds to the rest of their resumes. Here's an interesting stat: Every goalie who played over 600 games in their career prior to league expansion in the early '90s is in our top 40, with the exception of Meloche and Bouchard. I think it's pretty likely that in different scenarios with more team support they would have managed some of the more high-profile accomplishments that typically put goalies on all-time lists, and at the end of the day I just decided to go with Meloche over some of the average goalies on strong teams that others were putting at the bottom of their lists (Osgood, Vernon, etc.).

I know you mentioned that you ranked Parent too high on your original list, but boy did your opinion of him drop like a rock. Interested to know your thought process there.

In short, the main reason I had Parent that high originally is because I thought there were some good arguments to have him above Ken Dryden. Once I changed my mind on that relative ranking, and started comparing Parent directly to different groups of goalies, some of his weaknesses became a bit more apparent and he ended up dropping quite a bit down the list as you can see.

I had Parent very high initially because his overall save percentage record was very good, and I had him rated pretty well relative to backup goalies on a study I did from some time ago, so I figured if anything his numbers were probably understated given how many penalties the Flyers took and the fact that he played on an expansion team in the late '60s. I also had some numbers from high-leverage playoff situations that suggested Parent was very strong in close games while Dryden padded his stats a bit in blowouts.

I changed my mind after looking more closely at Parent's early career results, particularly relative to Doug Favell and Jacques Plante. It seems pretty clear that the Flyers were doing a decent job defensively, despite being an expansion team. There was also a fairly consistent opinion from contemporary sources that Plante had a big impact on Parent while played together in Toronto, which is a big reason why Parent was able to elevate his game during to his Philly peak, which works against the theory that he was an all-time great goalie all along. I also figured that I was probably overcompensating for the Flyers' team discipline and not enough for their team shot quality in the mid-'70s, given the unbalanced league.

Parent also suffered in my round 2 rankings from a general shift between focusing on peak to focusing on the length of a guy's extended prime and rewarding elite consistency. Obviously Parent's injuries had an impact on the length of his prime, though, and it's tough to adjust for that.

 

[MXD]

I dislike...

+ Broda that high in Round 1 (at least compared to Durnan)
+ Sean Burke at 36. I can somewhat understand Burke's placement with Joseph's placement, AS FAR AS REGULAR SEASON IS CONCERNED. But Joseph was an above-average playoff performer; Burke was not only an below-average one, but he was squarely below replcement level if you take out his first season. Actually, Burke at 36 with Giacomin at 41 seems odd.


I like...

+ Corrected the big gap between Broda and Durnan in round 2
+ Proper consideration given to Joseph in both rounds

 

[ContrarianGoaltender]

+ Sean Burke at 36. I can somewhat understand Burke's placement with Joseph's placement, AS FAR AS REGULAR SEASON IS CONCERNED. But Joseph was an above-average playoff performer; Burke was not only an below-average one, but he was squarely below replcement level if you take out his first season. Actually, Burke at 36 with Giacomin at 41 seems odd.

This gets to a difference of evaluation method, probably. I don't make conclusions about goalies based on small sample sizes, and I don't generally make significant distinctions between regular season and playoff performance unless I think there are strong contextual reasons to do so. That means Burke loses almost nothing in my evaluation scheme because he didn't have a large playoff sample (just 345 shots against in the playoffs between the ages of 22 and 34), although I understand why others would disagree with that perspective.

Also, I took into account international play for goalies, which is a significant plus for Burke, and something to look at if you doubt his ability in big games.

As for Giacomin, after all the debates I continue to see him as highly overrated. I'm actually surprised that someone else ranked him lower on their original list than I did.

 

[MXD]

This gets to a difference of evaluation method, probably. I don't make conclusions about goalies based on small sample sizes, and I don't generally make significant distinctions between regular season and playoff performance unless I think there are strong contextual reasons to do so. That means Burke loses almost nothing in my evaluation scheme because he didn't have a large playoff sample (just 345 shots against in the playoffs between the ages of 22 and 34), although I understand why others would disagree with that perspective.

Also, I took into account international play for goalies, which is a significant plus for Burke, and something to look at if you doubt his ability in big games.

As for Giacomin, after all the debates I continue to see him as highly overrated. I'm actually surprised that someone else ranked him lower on their original list than I did.

Awesome reply. While Burke basically Giacomined in the playoffs, he effectively didn't play that much in the playoffs, and his absence in the playoffs can doesn't stem from his regular season play; a proposition you probably agree with, considering you ranked him 36.

 

[seventieslord]

FYI, added participation record.

 

[Dennis Bonvie]

I liked seeing Burke, Irbe and Meloche.

Not on my list because I've got no guts.

Goalies who were not exactly in ideal career situations.

All 3 will be forever underrated in my opinion.

 

[TheDevilMadeMe]

I had already submitted my list when CG made his case for Irbe in the preliminary thread - I submitted my list to the project email address right before opening voting to everyone else, so I wouldn't be biased by what I saw on other lists

But I would have seriously given Irbe consideration for the 50s range after reading his post there. Not a big deal though, since the final product was "only" a top 40.

 

[tarheelhockey]

Thankfully, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine captured the lists for this project, which were deleted during HF's adventure in software upgrades. Restoring them here in case the Wayback Machine link ever goes dead.

1	Dominik Hasek
2	Jacques Plante
3	Glenn Hall
4	Patrick Roy
5	Bernie Parent
6	Ken Dryden
7	Martin Brodeur
8	Frank Brimsek
9	Terry Sawchuk
10	Turk Broda
11	Tony Esposito
12	Johnny Bower
13	Charlie Gardiner
14	Ed Belfour
15	Georges Vezina
16	Vladislav Tretiak
17	Clint Benedict
18	Bill Durnan
19	George Hainsworth
20	Gump Worsley
21	Jiri Holecek
22	Roy Worters
23	Tiny Thompson
24	Curtis Joseph
25	Roberto Luongo
26	Rogie Vachon
27	John Vanbiesbrouck
28	Billy Smith
29	Hugh Lehman
30	Grant Fuhr
31	Tom Barrasso
32	Henrik Lundqvist
33	Chuck Rayner
34	Tim Thomas
35	Hap Holmes
36	Sean Burke
37	Dan Bouchard
38	Mike Liut
39	Vladimir Dzurilla
40	Harry Lumley
41	Ed Giacomin
42	Gerry Cheevers
43	Percy LeSueur
44	Alec Connell
45	Al Rollins
46	Chico Resch
47	Jean-Sebastien Giguere
48	Mike Richter
49	Dave Kerr
50	Lorne Chabot
51	Ryan Miller
52	Gilles Meloche
53	Arturs Irbe
54	Seth Martin
55	Mike Palmateer
56	Paddy Moran
57	Leif Holmqvist
58	Miikka Kiprusoff
59	Pete Peeters
60	Tomas Vokoun

[TBODY] [/TBODY]