Fighting for their playoff lives, the St. Louis Blues took care of business when the Vancouver Canucks rolled into town on Friday, moving within one point of the second wild card after their 4-1 win over Vancouver.
Though it was Anders Nilsson in net for the first time in five games, the familiar pattern of surrendering early goals continued—on the second St. Louis shot of the game, 40 seconds into the first period.
The Canucks also started the third period poorly, allowing Vladimir Tarasenko to get his 28th of the year to make the score 3-1 and put the game out of reach just 14 seconds in.
If you're interested in a regular dose of fascinating, in-depth hockey talk, I can't recommend "The Full 60" podcast from Craig Custance of The Athletic enough. His format is one guest per week and he doesn't talk much about the news of the day, aiming to keep each episode timeless and bingeable.
A couple of weeks ago, Custance's guest was goaltending expert Cat Silverman, who writes for The Athletic and In Goal magazine. I'm not normally one to get too excited about fancy stats, but Cat did a great job of explaining how the "Quality Starts Percentage" statistic can provide valuable insight on a goalie's tendencies. She says it's the second number she looks at when judging goaltending quality, after save percentage.
The stat can be found
here, on the Hockey Reference website: "QS%."
If you hover over the header, you'll see a brief description. The number is derived by looking at the number of starts a goalie has, and seeing how many of them are "good." A Quality Start is defined as a night where the goalie's save percentage is better than the league average save percentage for the year, or a save percentage above .885 on a night when he sees less than 20 shots.
What the percentage tells us is how consistent a goalie is. The league average is .530, so any number above that is considered good.
Not surprisingly, good goalies are good most of the time and get the team success that goes along with their strong efforts in net. But further down the list, the numbers before more revealing.
For example, three veteran goalies have each played 50 games this season and have identical save percentages of .906, well below the league average. They rank around 60th out of 88 goalies that have seen NHL action this year.
• Washington's Braden Holtby, the 2016 Vezina winner and 2017 Jennings winner for the league's best save percentage, is struggling a bit this year but out of his 50 starts this season, 28 of them count as quality starts, for a solid .560 percentage.
• Over in St. Louis, Jake Allen has struggled more with consistency. Of his 52 starts, just 24 have been considered quality starts, so his Qs% is below the league average at .490. Friday, of course, was a quality start for him thanks to his .950 save percentage against the Canucks, where he gave up one goal on 20 shots.
• Finally, in Brooklyn, Jaroslav Halak has just 19 quality starts out of 51 appearances for the New York Islanders. That's a QS% of just .413. Behind the league's most porous defense, most nights are a grind for Halak, but four nights out of 10, he'll turn in a stellar performance.
Silverman's based in Phoenix and seems especially fascinated by this stat thanks to years of watching Mike Smith's inconsistent play with the Coyotes. Not surprisingly, Smith's QS% varied wildly from year to year, from .627 in 2011-12 when he placed fourth in Vezina voting and the Coyotes made that surprise trip to the Western Conference Final down to .475 in 2014-15, when he led the league in losses and goals against.
Though Antti Raanta has had injury issues since joining the Coyotes this year, Silverman believes that he will be a long-term solution for the team in net. In 42 starts this year, Raanta has an outstanding QS% of .659—amazing for a team that's currently tied with the Canucks at the bottom of the Western Conference standings. (By comparison, Smith's QS% in Calgary this year is .585 behind what many were calling the best defense in the league going into the season).
So, where do our Canucks goaltenders stand? Jacob Markstrom's at .500—below the league average but in the same range as Florida's James Reimer, Detroit's Jimmy Howard and Buffalo's Robin Lehner. Markstrom's good literally half the time he plays but once again, as I think we know intuitively, many of his stronger performances aren't backed up by run support, offensively. And when he's bad, he's bad.
As for Nilsson? He's 79th out of 88 goalies with a QS% of .304. He has started 26 games and been good in seven of them. Those two early-season shutouts stand out, and he was solid early on: at the end of November, his record was 6-2-1 and people were clamouring to get him more starts. Since then, though, he's gone 1-12-2, with that one win coming against the Bruins last month. It's no wonder that Travis Green has been leaning on Markstrom as much as possible, and why there's now talk that even though Nilsson's under contract for another year at $2.5 million, he may not be back in Vancouver next season.
Also worth noting while we're here, nearly-39-year-old Roberto Luongo has a .655 QS% this year and 37-year-old Ryan Miller isn't far behind at .611. That's a big improvement from his time in Vancouver. It's interesting to note that Markstrom's number this year is actually better than all three of Miller's seasons in Vancouver, where he was .489 (the year they made the playoffs), .490 and .481.
I think the takeaway here is that Markstrom's doing just fine, under the circumstances. He can't save this year's Canucks by himself, but he's doing about as much as can reasonably be expected.
Vancouver Canucks Blogger • 
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