Ondrej Pavelec was drafted by the Winnipeg Jets in the second round of the 2005 Entry Draft, a culmination of what had been a pretty decorated career as a teenage goalie.
Pavelec is a native of Kladno, Czechoslovakia (home of the World’s Greatest Sports Mullet) and a quick perusal of his Wiki page is pretty impressive:
- 2x Jacques Plantes Memorial Trophy winner for the top goals against average in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League (QMJHL) as a member of the Cape Breton Screaming Eagles from 2005-2007. Given, GAA trophies have as much to do with the team than the player, and Cape Breton finished 7/18 and 2/18 in those years.
- QMJHL All-Rookie Team (2006)
- QMJHL First Team All-Star (both years).
After he was drafted, he also won the AHL Calder Cup (the AHL’s league trophy) with then-affiliate Chicago Wolves (they are now the St. Louis Blues’ affiliate).
What he’s done since showing up in the NHL, though, paints quite a different picture than the goalie that was so highly decorated when he finally supplanted Kari Lehtonen as the regular goaltender for Atlanta (now Winnipeg) in 2009.
Before we get to Pavelec’s specific performance, a few notes on goaltending.
Even Strength Save Percentage and Contracts
Hockey is a luck-driven sport at times and goaltending is no different; a slap shot a half-inch up or down and a puck hits the crossbar or is in the goalie’s glove instead of going in the net. That’s the nature of hockey. Naturally, the talented players will get “luckier” more often, which is why Alex Ovechkin will score some lucky goals but part of it is because he takes a pile of shots and is a good scorer.
However, track records have the ability to show the hockey fan the approximate talent level of a given player. No one really figured that Jamie Benn of the Dallas Stars would be a star in the NHL or else he would have gone higher than 129th overall in the 2007 draft. Now that Benn has posted four straight 20-plus goal seasons in his first four full years and is turning 25 in the summer (not to mention a member of Canada’s Olympic team), it’s safe to assume that, given his track record, Benn is indeed a star.
This brings me to a very simple graphic from the Arctic Ice Hockey blog (in a post by the person who runs a fantastic analytics site in Behind The Net) which covers the Winnipeg Jets:
What this graph says, according to the attached article above, is that you would essentially need four seasons worth of even strength shots to know whether your goalie is good or not. A 60-start season for a goalie will bring roughly 1,300 even strength shots and three seasons will bring us down to about a 10 percent chance that the save percentage of an average goalie is actually luck. If we get to five full seasons, the number drops under 5 percent, which is about two standard deviations away and fairly insignificant.
As noted in the blog, NHL general managers don’t usually get the chance to get at least 5,200 even strength shots and typically have to make a decision on a goalie much earlier than that (keep in mind that league-average save percentages for goaltenders has risen for several years now and is now over .920):
- From 2010-2013, Corey Crawford faced 3,161 even strength shots and came out with a .923 save percentage. He backstopped Chicago to a Stanley Cup last year, ranking fifth out of eight goalies in overall save percentage (min. 10 games). He signed a six-year, $36 million contract in the offseason.
- From 2008-2013, Semyon Varlamov faced 3,432 even strength shots and came out with a .922 save percentage. After his 43rd game this season, Varlamov signed a five-year extension worth nearly $6 million per season.
- Once Pavelec got the starting gig in net, he played from 2009-2012 for Atlanta/Winnipeg. In that stretch, he faced 4,102 shots, which is about three seasons. He posted a .918 even strength save percentage in that stretch. He signed a 5 year, $19.5-million contract in the summer of 2012. In the 2,134 even strength shots since, he has a .911 save percentage.
The contracts were all given out before they really had to but there are a host of factors as to why the GM might do that, some of which include: appearance of loyalty to players; fear of player improving and costing more; locking up what is perceived as a cornerstone. The problem is the data available says that the first two were average goalies and the third was below that. All of them got multi-year, multi-million per year contracts.
What the Jets did was lock up a goalie who had a good pedigree but below-average results for three straight years. That has continued since the contract was signed.
The inspiration today came from this:
More unrest around the Czech hockey team: Ondrej Pavelec won't play the tournament-opener against Sweden tomorrow. He's not even dressing.
— Chris Johnston (@reporterchris) February 11, 2014
The follow-up came out that Pavelec would probably play the second game against Latvia. So the Winnipeg Jets’ regular starting goalie for the next few years was healthy scratched in favor of two goalies from the Kontinental Hockey League.
The reason this is a big deal is this: enter the following two search strings in Google “Jets should trade Dustin Byfuglien” and “Jets should trade Evander Kane.” I won’t point out specific articles, but the focus for some reason is on a defenseman that led the Jets’ defensemen in CorsiRel last year and was a close second the year before. Another focus is on a 22-year-old forward who has a better goals per game average since the start of the 2011 season than Jordan Eberle, Tyler Seguin, Jeff Skinner, James van Riemsdyk, Jamie Benn and Matt Duchene (Kane at 0.38, the rest at 0.37 or lower). Instead, the focus should be on the goalie with the second-worst overall save percentage of any regular goalie from 2009-now and is being healthy scratched for his national team.
It’s really quite something that Pavelec’s performance is mostly brushed aside. The general manager may not have had much of a choice to sign Pavelec when he did – he was a pending free agent – but there is a choice now. The Czech coaching staff proved that.
