The Athletic’s follow-up to last week’s goalie rankings
July 31, 2024
The Athletic’s follow-up to last week’s goalie rankings
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Last week, we published an attempt to rank the goaltending outlook for all 32 NHL teams. It was a three-person effort, with Jesse Granger handling the scouting duties for each team’s current situation, Scott Wheeler grading the prospect pipelines and Sean McIndoe looking at contracts and cap situations. By averaging out and weighting the scores, we wound up with a countdown from the worst outlook to the very best.
And then, in a stunning development that nobody could have foreseen, some of you didn’t agree with each and every ranking.
That was fine. It was even a big part of the point. But the twist here is that we didn’t necessarily agree with the overall rankings either. After all, all three of us had our own views, and the final list had come together by averaging them out. That meant that we might not necessarily buy the exact order either.
Scott is enjoying some well-earned vacation this week, but Jesse and Sean figured it would be worthwhile to take one last look at the project, and have our say on what we got right, what we think we maybe didn’t and any final words we can offer.
A peek behind the curtain: We all submitted our rankings for our own category separately, and only combined them into a final list as the last step. That means none of us knew how it would turn out until we saw that final ranking. Given that, it’s inevitable that there would be some rankings we were surprised by, or even disagreed with.
Let’s start on the positive side: Which teams did you personally feel deserved a better ranking than they ultimately received?
McIndoe: The ones that stand out for me are teams such as the New York Rangers and Tampa Bay Lightning, who appear to have very good goaltending right now and yet didn’t rank all that highly, largely because they had low scores in terms of prospects and cap situation.
I don’t think we got any of those individual rankings wrong, per se, but I do think that maybe the weighting that I came up with could have used some adjustment. The original plan was to weigh all three categories (current, future, cap) equally, but it quickly became apparent that that would place too much importance on the cap situation, which is very important but, as we’ve seen in recent years, can be worked around. I eventually settled on the 100/75/50 weighting that we went with, and at some point you have to just pick something and stick with it, because otherwise you’re putting your thumb on the scale to get the result you want. But I get why a fan of the Rangers or Lightning would look at the overall rankings and say, “Aren’t there teams ranked ahead of us who’d rather have what we have right now and worry about the future down the road?”
1 comment
Last week, we published an attempt to rank the goaltending outlook for all 32 NHL teams. It was a three-person effort, with Jesse Granger handling the scouting duties for each team’s current situation, Scott Wheeler grading the prospect pipelines and Sean McIndoe looking at contracts and cap situations. By averaging out and weighting the scores, we wound up with a countdown from the worst outlook to the very best.
And then, in a stunning development that nobody could have foreseen, some of you didn’t agree with each and every ranking.
That was fine. It was even a big part of the point. But the twist here is that we didn’t necessarily agree with the overall rankings either. After all, all three of us had our own views, and the final list had come together by averaging them out. That meant that we might not necessarily buy the exact order either.
Scott is enjoying some well-earned vacation this week, but Jesse and Sean figured it would be worthwhile to take one last look at the project, and have our say on what we got right, what we think we maybe didn’t and any final words we can offer.
A peek behind the curtain: We all submitted our rankings for our own category separately, and only combined them into a final list as the last step. That means none of us knew how it would turn out until we saw that final ranking. Given that, it’s inevitable that there would be some rankings we were surprised by, or even disagreed with.
Let’s start on the positive side: Which teams did you personally feel deserved a better ranking than they ultimately received?
McIndoe: The ones that stand out for me are teams such as the New York Rangers and Tampa Bay Lightning, who appear to have very good goaltending right now and yet didn’t rank all that highly, largely because they had low scores in terms of prospects and cap situation.
I don’t think we got any of those individual rankings wrong, per se, but I do think that maybe the weighting that I came up with could have used some adjustment. The original plan was to weigh all three categories (current, future, cap) equally, but it quickly became apparent that that would place too much importance on the cap situation, which is very important but, as we’ve seen in recent years, can be worked around. I eventually settled on the 100/75/50 weighting that we went with, and at some point you have to just pick something and stick with it, because otherwise you’re putting your thumb on the scale to get the result you want. But I get why a fan of the Rangers or Lightning would look at the overall rankings and say, “Aren’t there teams ranked ahead of us who’d rather have what we have right now and worry about the future down the road?”