Research Report: Comparative Goaltending Efficacy (2021-2025 Stanley Cup Playoffs)

Inclusion Criteria

Restricted to goaltenders with a minimum of 10 Games Played across the 2021-22 through 2024-25 Stanley Cup Playoffs combined.

Primary Findings: The Era’s Postseason Elite

The following table represents the top 20 goaltenders aggregated across the 2021-22 through 2024-25 Stanley Cup Playoffs, ranked by their average standing across all five pillars.

Detailed Logical Analysis

1. Bobrovsky as the Era’s Playoff Specialist

Sergei Bobrovsky's #1 Composite of 5.1 across 76 GP is the era's defining postseason finding. He carries 39% more playoff games than the second-highest workload (Oettinger at 63 GP) while finishing the multi-year Composite at #1. His pillar profile (#1 WinRate, #11 SO, #11 Svs/GA, #2 LossRate, #3 GA/W) shows the same cross-pillar consistency across four postseasons that the single-season cuts identified in 2023-24 and 2024-25. The aggregate confirms what the back-to-back single seasons suggested: he is the era's premier high-volume playoff goaltender by an objective measure.

2. The Volume-Efficiency Inversion

Of the era's top five aggregated playoff GP totals — Bobrovsky (76), Oettinger (63), Skinner (50), Shesterkin (43), Vasilevskiy (39) — three finish in the top 12 of the Composite (Bobrovsky #1, Shesterkin #8, Oettinger #11), with Skinner at #12 and Vasilevskiy at #19. The pattern represents a clean inversion of the regular-season workload tax. In playoff aggregate, the goaltenders carrying the heaviest workloads are not penalized — they are predominantly elite by Composite. Postseason GP is itself a survivorship marker: more games means more rounds advanced, which means more opportunities to demonstrate cross-pillar efficiency at the highest competitive level.

3. The Single-Run Outliers

Beyond Bobrovsky's multi-year dominance, the era's playoff Composite leaderboard is shaped by single-run peaks: Adin Hill (#2, 30 GP across his 2022-23 Cup run plus follow-on appearances), Frederik Andersen (#3, 32 GP), and Jordan Binnington (#4, 13 GP). Hill's #2 finish is driven almost entirely by the 1.4 Composite of his 2022-23 Cup run. The aggregate Composite identifies both the multi-year specialists (Bobrovsky) and the single-event outliers (Hill, Binnington) within the same ranking — a structural feature, not a flaw, of applying the methodology to multi-year postseason data.

Conclusions

The 2021-2025 postseason aggregate produces three structural findings: Bobrovsky as the era's defining playoff Composite leader (#1 across 76 GP), a clean inversion of the regular-season workload tax in postseason play, and a leaderboard shaped by both multi-year specialists and single-run Cup outliers. The methodology produces a multi-year Composite that the single-season cuts predict and the actual postseason results confirm.

Thesis: The Postseason Composite as Era-Defining

The Bobrovsky Era

The aggregated postseason Composite identifies Bobrovsky as the era's defining playoff goaltender — a finding consistent with his back-to-back Cup victories in 2024 and 2025 and his repeat #1 single-season Composites in 2023-24 and 2024-25. The methodology produces a multi-year #1 that the single-season data already foreshadowed.

The Workload Inversion

The regular-season pattern (workload tax) inverts in playoff aggregate. Three of the era's top five postseason GP carriers finish in the top 12 of the Composite. The structural reason is sample-bias: deep postseason GP requires advancing through rounds, which requires the very efficiency the Composite measures. The same goaltenders are not being measured under the same conditions as the regular season — they are being measured during the games their teams won.

The Single-Run Effect

The leaderboard accommodates both multi-year and single-event greatness. Bobrovsky's #1 reflects four postseasons of work; Hill's #2 reflects one Cup run amplified by a smaller follow-on sample. The aggregate Composite does not discriminate between "specialist" and "moment-of-glory" — it ranks both on the same scale, leaving the GP column to convey the difference in sample.

Final Conclusion

The 2021-2025 postseason aggregate produces Bobrovsky as the era's defining playoff Composite leader, inverts the regular-season workload tax in postseason data, and accommodates both multi-year specialists and single-run outliers within the same ranking. Read alongside the 2021-2026 regular-season historical analysis, the postseason aggregate completes the era's full goaltending picture: which goaltenders the methodology identifies as elite when the games matter most, distinct from which it identifies as elite across the full season.

The complete table

26 qualifying goaltenders · every pillar value and rank

Pillars: Win Rate (W/GP) · Shutout Rate (SO/GS) · Save Efficiency Ratio (Svs/GA) · Loss Suppression (L/GS) · Victory Efficiency (GA/W). Composite = mean of the five pillar ranks; lower is better. Full definitions: methodology.