Originally Posted by
Pengwin7
Thumbs up on this article as well.
I formed my own ballpark guess on average goalie age of top 15 and was within <1 year.
And I think you have good findings here.
With regard to "top 15" evaluation per cc, its statistically inappropriate.
There's only 30 NHL teams and maybe only 20-25 have clear cut #1 NHL goalies out of 60 roster NHL goalies, so 15/60 = 25% of the full player pool and 15/25 = 60% of the full majority-minute pool.
With D-men and 30 NHL teams, there may be 2-3 D-men per team logging 20+ min. So 15/180 = 8% of the full player pool and 15/75 = 20% of the big-minute D-men pool.
So, by analyzing "top 15", yeah, of course top goalies are going to be seem more consistent, because there's less quantity of them.
More statistically appropriate would be to look over a range of the top players - i.e. Goalies playing 55-70gp/82gp might be similar to all D-men playing 20-25min gp.
The percentage of players consistently in the top 25% or 50% of their positional group, I'd speculate, would be similar.
Top players at their position are top players at their position, for some good range of time - and I'd say the very top 25% D-men are elite longer than the top 25% of goalies.
Defensemen can excel at their games for longer periods of time because their game is steeped deeply in maintainable attributes like hockey smarts and fluid skating.
Goalies rely on mental preparation, reflexes, and game flow analysis. The former two can change with time, depending on the goalie's mental strength & body conditioning.