Well, I guess meaningless is perhaps too strong, but you're eschewing them in favor of your own subjective opinion. And given that goalkeeping is much much different now, using prior film and trying to mirror your evaluations here to those players seems objectively impossible. It also seems to me that your argument about Thomas' trophies is disingenuous. You're saying he had weak competition and that's why he won those trophies, and yet you rank that weak competition above him.
Yes, that objective is to win, which Thomas certainly did. For goalies more specifically, that goal is to stop pucks from going into your own net, which Thomas certainly did. There's a question of how much statistics and the eye test should be valued. But given that we don't have enough film - or at least I don't believe we have enough film - to have watched every player to have played hockey, then there must be some metric we use. Statistics, you have said, do not allow for ranking. Neither do trophies. Rather, it's this subjective evaluation of talent which is impossible for us to utilize for every player at all times in a consistent manner. Nor do we watch enough film to be consistent and confident in our evaluations. Perhaps I speak too broadly, but I doubt someone is able to claim they watch so much hockey film that they can confidently and consistently compare every player across eras. Hell, I watch a fair amount of hockey now and I don't always feel like I can do that just when comparing current NHL players.
I don't think stats are the end all be all of evaluation, but comparing stats is important, particularly when those stats are put up on the same team. I may have missed it, but that's one of Thomas' arguments that is most compelling - Rask put up substantially worse numbers than Thomas on the same team utilizing the same system, and yet Rask is placed several tiers above Thomas.
Subjective opinion is a dirty term any more, but statistics are subjective too. Just because you can type it into a calculator doesn't make it objective all of a sudden. Corsi is a great example of this...when it stopped being useful to NHL clubs, it was made public (as previous "advanced" stats have a history of doing...save pct/efficiency in 1983, plus/minus in 1967, individual ice times, individual shot totals, etc.) and, as the masses tend to do, they go all shiny-new-toy-syndrome with it and nominate at it as the greatest thing since the CD player...but when you look at it and you look at what it measures, it's incredibly biased...low-hockey-sense, shoot-from-everywhere defensemen (Cody Franson, for instance) are heroes in this...streak-and-shoot wingers are lauded (Tyler Kennedy, who just stares down at his feet for the 30 seconds he is on the ice skating as fast as he can in a straight line, up and back)...but checking centers are damaged. You're taking a number and assigning obscene weight to it and going "look, I'm being objective because I chose this stat over all other stats to be the most valuable" - that's free range subjectivity you're farming there, fella...on a dumber scale, it's like saying "Rod Langway never finished top 10 in points...he can't be that good." ...well, you're gonna get an awful lot of forwards on your list if that's the metric you assign obscene weight to.
Goaltending is much different now. You rate the goaltenders among their peers, that's where you start. That's an imminently achievable task.
"Weak competition" refers to the era of goaltending as a whole. Not individuals in a season. Look at the Vezina trophy ballots and look at the Stanley Cup Finals goalie matchups from, say, 1984 to 2004, then 2006 to present...it's a sick joke what we've put out there in the post-lockout era...shows that coaching has advanced to such a great degree and what players can be compensated for and which ones can't in today's game...look at how rosters are built...look what left the game, good goalies left and when good goalies couldn't be found to replace them, we just replaced the bad defensemen instead...look how much more mobile defensemen are now, how much better they are at moving the puck...I spend entire Monday mornings working with my defensemen on escapability, partner support, zone exits, etc. every week for years...there's no way that would have been the case 20 years ago...we would have worked on clap-bombs and crease clearing...the league compensates to accommodate for its weakest link(s) as part of the natural ebb and flow of sport...
Goaltending dries up, so now looks who's coming to dinner...Pronger is in three SCF with three different teams in five years, Chara, Doughty, Lidstrom...guys that keep pucks out of their own net...Dan Girardi was in the Norris race in 2012...Suter, Bouwmeester, Vlasic, Seabrook, these guys are logging obscene amounts of time because they're protecting (potentially) a weak link...now, as the goaltending talent starts to re-percolate, look at where the game moves...now Erik Karlsson, now Brent Burns, these are the Norris guys...PK Subban is in a Final, Burns is in a Final, Klingberg is in the Norris discussion, Letang is in a Final, Byfuglien is going deep...this is, in part, to compensate for a lack of complete centers in the league that can be impactful without the puck in all three zones...so it's puck carrying defensemen (all of which that I just named are that, multi-line carriers) that rule the day...
Look at where the MVP voting shifts to now...last few years, Price and Ovechkin vying for one, Kane wins one over Crosby and winger Jamie Benn, nothing you can do about McDavid in 2017, I mean that was just unreal, kid's a wagon and he's all alone...2018 Taylor Hall beats out MacKinnon, LW Giroux joins the fray...obviously there's going to always be centers in this race, of course...but there seems to be a little bit of a shift in what talent is available league wide and the league will scramble to compensate for that...this happens throughout history...
The metric isn't terribly useful if it doesn't tell the story accurately. So in the same way you're throwing your hands up and going "well, we probably don't have enough film or time to figure this out...so let's just settle for this and hope it works out...even though we know it doesn't..." Right? We know it's not a great measure, right? We see the variably when players leave certain teams/situations and how it has a direct impact, I trust? We see how it doesn't follow goalies around like it's tied directly to their talent. That (settling on save pct. and going, "well, we tried...kinda..."), to me, is an extremist position...you guys think me rating players on their talent is an extreme position because it's "subjective" or it's [this] or it's [that]...well, I find your position to be similarly absurd, with all due respect. Like it or lump it, if you want something productive, we're going to have to meet in the middle. One might suggest, if you're a football fan, to look at Pro Football Focus' work...video meets analytics...if you knew what NHL teams were doing right now in their analytics departments (hint: it's not corsi nonsense...they blew by that years ago...hell, even richer major junior teams are past that), you'd see that at the proprietary level they're doing that kind of work...teams like analytics, I like analytics, my dog likes analytics...but they gotta point you in the right direction, they have to have foundations in the game...you can't reverse engineer these square numbers and jam them into a round hole and go, "ok, done..." - will never work. Never, ever, ever, ever....ever. For goaltending, there's a really simple framework/data point to use...goals allowed. Easily located by way of video, fewer data points to have to deal with (as opposed to passes received or something for skaters) and you start to evaluate them based on quality and timeliness (as those are things that impact games...saves don't win games, save don't affect games...you can take a wheelbarro of saves to the bank and you won't get one thin dime for them) and you start there and see where you get...I tracked this for Pittsburgh for a time, creating an adjusted GAA when Fleury and Murray were sharing the nets...paints a different picture than general averaging stats do...point is, don't give up so easily...if you want a quality product, you need to do quality work...quality work is harder to do than sorting by save pct. on NHL.com...
Rask vs. Thomas thing already explained. Requires nothing more I don't think. The idea that they played in the same conditions is flawed or we have to admit that Rask did better (he's like the all time leader in the stat du jour, and led the league in everything y'all like as a rookie...what more could he have done from that perspective?)
just kidding, relax, mudslingers)...it's about viewing the game through a different lens and looking at things in a different way. A lot of times people see the game but don't watch it...it's 2D vs 3D in a way...there's more dimension to it than it is reduced to for simplicity sometimes and when you take on these major projects - and I don't want my name attached to anything that sucks, I want it to be the best it can be or not at all - it's important that we see things from more angles...
