Research Report: Comparative Goaltending Efficacy (2021-22 Season)
Inclusion Criteria
Restricted to goaltenders with a minimum of 15 Games Played during the 2021-22 season.
Primary Findings: The Season’s Elite
The following table represents the top 20 goaltenders for the 2021-22 season, ranked by their average standing across all five pillars.
| Rank | Player | Team | GP | Composite Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Igor Shesterkin | NYR | 53 | 3.9 |
| 2 | Jacob Markstrom | CGY | 63 | 6.6 |
| 3 | Darcy Kuemper | COL | 57 | 6.8 |
| 4 | Frederik Andersen | CAR | 52 | 7.2 |
| 5 | Pavel Francouz | COL | 21 | 7.8 |
| 6 | Jack Campbell | TOR | 49 | 9.4 |
| 7 | Sergei Bobrovsky | FLA | 54 | 12.2 |
| 8 | Ville Husso | STL | 40 | 13.0 |
| 9 | Tristan Jarry | PIT | 58 | 16.2 |
| 10 | Cam Talbot | MIN | 49 | 16.2 |
| 11 | Linus Ullmark | BOS | 41 | 16.2 |
| 12 | Antti Raanta | CAR | 28 | 16.7 |
| 13 | Ilya Sorokin | NYI | 52 | 17.0 |
| 14 | Brian Elliott | TBL | 19 | 17.3 |
| 15 | Andrei Vasilevskiy | TBL | 63 | 19.1 |
| 16 | Eric Comrie | WPG | 19 | 19.4 |
| 17 | Mike Smith | EDM | 28 | 19.9 |
| 18 | Jeremy Swayman | BOS | 41 | 21.1 |
| 19 | Dan Vladar | CGY | 23 | 21.3 |
| 20 | Casey DeSmith | PIT | 26 | 21.7 |
Detailed Logical Analysis
1. Shesterkin’s Individual Dominance
Igor Shesterkin’s 3.9 Composite Score is built on individual shot-stopping rather than team support. He ranks #1 in Save Efficiency Ratio, #1 in Victory Efficiency, #3 in Win Rate, and #5 in Shutout Rate, with only Loss Suppression (#9.5) holding him back from a sub-3 score. His 14.30 Svs/GA is the highest single-season Save Efficiency Ratio in any of our datasets — the methodology surfaces him as the season’s outright individual leader, not coincidentally aligning with his Vezina Trophy win.
2. The Colorado Tandem — Pre-Cup Signal
Colorado places two goaltenders in the top 5 — Darcy Kuemper at #3 (6.8) and Pavel Francouz at #5 (7.8). Francouz did so on only 21 GP, the smallest sample among the season’s top 5, but his rank profile (#2 WinRate, #6 SO Rate, #14 LossRate) suggests a starter-tier efficiency profile in a backup workload. Colorado would win the Stanley Cup four months later, with both goaltenders contributing to a system that produced the most efficient dual-goaltender presence of the regular season.
3. The Workload Drag
The two goaltenders with the highest game loads of the season — Juuse Saros (67 GP) and Connor Hellebuyck (66 GP) — finish at Composite Scores of 22.0 and 36.0 respectively, well outside the top 10. Of the five highest-volume goaltenders (67, 66, 64, 63, 63), only Markstrom (#2) cracks the top 10. The pattern that defines the historical thesis — that high game load erodes Loss Suppression and GA/Win pillars — is observable inside the season’s first frame.
Conclusions
The 2021-22 season presents three structural truths the Composite captures: an individual outlier driven by Save Efficiency (Shesterkin), a system-built tandem foreshadowing a Stanley Cup run (Colorado), and the early instance of the workload tax on the league’s iron-men. The methodology produces results consistent with the season’s most prominent reputational outcome — Shesterkin’s Vezina — while also surfacing structural patterns invisible to single-metric ranking.
Thesis: The Vezina-Composite Alignment Year
The Individual Apex
Shesterkin’s #1 Composite ranking aligns with the season’s actual Vezina Trophy result, providing external validation for the multi-pillar model. His Save Efficiency Ratio of 14.30 is the highest single-season figure in any dataset we have produced — the methodology is sensitive enough to identify a true individual-skill outlier and rank him decisively.
The Cup-Bound Tandem
Colorado’s dual top-five placement (Kuemper #3, Francouz #5) is the season’s clearest team-system signal. Both goaltenders held the same statistical territory across multiple pillars, indicating that the team’s defensive structure produced parallel efficiency profiles. The Cup result months later confirms what the Composite already showed.
The Workload Tax
Saros and Hellebuyck — the league’s two highest-volume goaltenders this season — each finished outside the top 20 on Composite, with their Loss Suppression and GA/W pillars dragging composites in the 22-36 range. The single-season data shows the workload effect cleanly: even competent Save Efficiency cannot compensate for the loss-rate accumulation that comes with a 60+ game workload.
Final Conclusion
The 2021-22 season demonstrates the Composite functioning at three levels: it identifies a true individual peak (Shesterkin), surfaces a team-system tandem (Colorado), and confirms the early presence of the workload tax. Read alongside the multi-year baseline, this season is the methodology’s first proof of single-season relevance.