Late to the conversation but I know everyone is just ragging on Grubauer being a finalist. Kind of hurts me to see a lot of outstanding goalie evaluators just dismissing him out of hand. Look I can agree with the sentiment that the NHL GM's voting on the Vezina for some reason completely disregard the immense amount of goalie data at their disposal and just focus on wins. Usually I'm pretty hard on Grubauer (and to be honest I'm still not sure if I'd either re-sign him or what would be my limit) however he has earned this nomination. Even with Clear Sight Analytics entering the foray and InGoal Mag having the connections they have to those numbers I believe we're seeing an "easy route" being taken to evaluate the numbers. We're looking at goalie numbers like we look at skaters numbers, specifically in a cumulative view (GSAx could be considered the same as points). The problem with this is that goalies can only handle what they are given by their defense and the opposing teams offense.
Where I believe we should be looking towards in terms of goalie evaluation is consistency. Now we have QS% which is simply how many starts does a goalie manage to post a SV% league average or higher. I personally have gone a step further and combined the idea of QS% with (the only public data I have access to) Natural Stat Trick's xGA model. So instead of it being post a SV% above league average it's have a GSAx equal or over 0. I've found that a team wins ~73% of the time when their starting goalie posts a GSAxQS and wins ~29% when they don't. So consistently posting a GSAxQS gives your team a pretty big chance at winning whereas not forces your team to really come out swinging offensively.
Now what does this mean for Grubauer, MAF, Vasi? Well Grubauer lead the way among all NHL goalies (that actually started more than 10 games) in GSAxQS% at 0.697, MAF a hair behind at 0.694 and then Vasi at 0.561. Now the next argument is that Grubauer had the easier workload. Going by xGA/60 this is true as Gru was at ~2, Vasi ~2.3, and MAF ~2.4 xGA/60 (~2.4 being the league average). This is where Gru is actually at a disadvantage. Gru doesn't have the same margin of error that MAF or Vasi does to have big cumulative stats like they do. And to show just how thin that margin of error is the average NHL goalie seeing MAF's workload puts up a 0.493, an average goalie in Vasi's situation puts up a 0.481 and the average goalie in Gru's situation...puts up a 0.435.
By all metrics MAF deserves this one (though I'll still contend this doesn't push him into the HHOF). However Gru has earned this top 3 nomination. He did exactly what a goalie is supposed to do, provide their team with the best chance to win every night. No goalie did it to the extent that Gru did.
