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Sean Allen, Special to ESPN.comSep 20, 2024, 08:00 AM ET
CloseSean Allen is a fantasy analyst for ESPN.com. He was the 2008 and 2009 Fantasy Sports Writers Association Hockey Writer of the Year. You can tweet him @seanard.
It’s not just anecdotal that tandems are a necessary evil when navigating your crease to the fantasy championship.
Of the 360 season-long goaltender stat lines that make up the top 24 goalies in each season since 2009-10, there are 98 goaltenders who did so while earning fewer than 55% of the available minutes in the crease (crease share). Of those 98 across the past 15 years, 46 of them are from the past five seasons.
Similarly, of the 16 goaltenders to finish among the top 12 in fantasy points with a crease share below 55%, eight of them are from the past five years.
The average crease share of a top-12 goalie in fantasy from 2009-10 to 2018-19 was 72.7%. That same average crease share for the past five seasons was 62.3%.
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The workload revamp isn’t just hitting tandems though, as workhorse goaltenders are becoming a thing of the past. Forget fantasy success being a factor: Among all goaltenders in the past 15 years, only 78 have managed to earn a crease share of higher than 75%. But note that 42 of those seasons come in the first five years of our statistics (from 2009-10 to 2013-14). In the past five years, only 10 goaltenders have hit that 75% threshold (Connor Hellebuyck did it four times, Andrei Vasilevskiy and Juuse Saros twice, with Carey Price and Thatcher Demko doing it once).
Martin Brodeur had a 90.6% crease share in 2009-10, which is unheard of now. Carey Price has the highest crease share in the past five seasons, posting 80.6% in 2019-20 – a full 10% lower.
So tandems are increasingly important. Let’s express it as thus: Of fantasy points generated…
Source link : https://www.espn.com/fantasy/hockey/story/_/id/41329323/espn-nhl-fantasy-hockey-goalie-tandems-draft-pass-wait
Author : Sean Allen
Publish date : 2024-09-20 14:41:18
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