The Vezina Trophy is being awarded tonight for the best goaltender of the 2023-24 NHL season, voted on by the general managers. Connor Hellebuyck is the presumptive favorite, and deservedly so. By traditional metrics, he led the league in save percentage and was third in goals against average among all goalies with at least 30 games played, a (somewhat arbitrary) cutoff I’ll use going forward. He was also second in general managers’ favorite stat, Wins.
Looking at slightly more advanced stats, Hellebuyck is also at or near the top in almost every category. He led the league in Hockey-Reference’s Quality Starts stat (starts with a SV% greater than league average) and was second in Quality Start percentage. His Quality Starts to Really Bad Stars (starts with a SV% below 85%) ratio was third in the league. Throughout the season, there wasn’t a single more dependable goalie on any given night.
By even more advanced stats, he was once again the class of the league. Hellebuyck lead the NHL in Goals Saved Above Expected (GSAx) whether using the Evolving-Hockey, NaturalStatTrick, or MoneyPuck version and it wasn’t particularly close. In each version he led the second best goalie by roughly 10 GSAx. By Evolving-Hockey’s GAR, he was once again roughly 10 goals better than the next best goaltender. Lastly, by my own Expected Saves metric (adjusted for season scoring environment), he was once again first overall, by roughly 10 saves over expected. No other goalie was so consistently near the top of the leaderboards across such a wide variety of measures.
Compared to previous Vezina Winners, Hellebuyck, comes out extremely favorably. By total Saves Over xS, he had the seventh best season since 2009-10, when my metric begins. Of the six goalies with better seasons, four won the Vezina, one had the misfortune of being Andrei Vasilievskiy last year when Linus Ullmark took the Vezina instead (one of the four other seasons with higher Saves Over xS) and one was John Gibson in 2018-19 when he lost to a good, but inferior season by Vasilievskiy (Wins!).
Furthermore, when looking at efficiency (how many Saves Over xS per save required, Hellebuyck’s pace is the diagonal grey line in the chart below), only four other goalies have exceeded his efficiency given the a similar workload (five if we include Igor Shesterkin’s 2021-22 season with nearly 200 fewer saves required).
So Hellebuyck deserves the Vezina, there’s no arguing that. However, I would like to set aside a bit of space to look at his fellow finalists as well. After the finalists were announced, the general consensus seemed to be that Hellebuyck and Demko were deserving, but Bobrovsky was nominated on the back of a high win count, plus his 2023 playoff run at the expense of more deserving candidates, most often Jordan Binnington, to my recollection. That may have been true, but by Saves Over xS, Bobrovsky and Demko were the pretty clear second and third best goalies this year.
It’s just one metric, and other models disagree, obviously, so this is far from cut and dry. However, Binnington, for example, definitely benefitted more than other goalies from missed nets. As a share of xG he faced, he was about three percentage points higher than Bobrovsky (26% vs 23%). In terms of raw xG missed, he had about 13 more expected goals miss the net than Bobrovsky. That’s a lot to pad his GSAx numbers and it’s what I hoped to account for with xS. Binnington had a very good season, but I believe Bobrovsky’s was better.1
To end, I’d like to look at each finalist’s season in terms of their cumulative Saves Over xS.
What stands out to me is Hellebuyck’s remarkable consistency this season. Although there are some ups and downs, his cumulative Saves Over xS never deviates far from his overall pace. Demko and Bobrovsky, in contrast both experienced fairly long stretches of hot and cold play. Demko started the season on fire, but cooled off as the season went along (in addition to dealing with an injury). Bobrovsky on the other hand was pretty unexceptional at the beginning of the year, but taking off like a rocket in the second half.
Hellebuyck’s probably going to win the Vezina and there’s no question he’s the right choice this year. However, for once, I think the general managers got it right with their top three.
For what it’s worth, Binnington and Bobrovsky were very close in MoneyPuck’s GSAx model and Evolving-Hockey’s GAR/WAR models.