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.
| Rank | Player | GP | Composite Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sergei Bobrovsky | 76 | 5.1 |
| 2 | Adin Hill | 30 | 5.7 |
| 3 | Frederik Andersen | 32 | 6.5 |
| 4 | Jordan Binnington | 13 | 8.1 |
| 5 | Akira Schmid | 10 | 8.6 |
| 6 | Antti Raanta | 19 | 9.3 |
| 7 | Mike Smith | 16 | 9.4 |
| 8 | Igor Shesterkin | 43 | 9.5 |
| 9 | Calvin Pickard | 13 | 9.9 |
| 10 | Darcy Kuemper | 22 | 11.0 |
| 11 | Jake Oettinger | 63 | 11.2 |
| 12 | Stuart Skinner | 50 | 12.1 |
| 13 | Logan Thompson | 14 | 12.4 |
| 14 | Jeremy Swayman | 19 | 12.6 |
| 15 | Arturs Silovs | 10 | 13.4 |
| 16 | Jack Campbell | 11 | 13.9 |
| 17 | Joseph Woll | 14 | 14.7 |
| 18 | Philipp Grubauer | 14 | 16.4 |
| 19 | Andrei Vasilevskiy | 39 | 16.6 |
| 20 | Filip Gustavsson | 11 | 17.7 |
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.