What Is Goals Against Average
Goals-Against Average Should Exist Abolished from the NHL's Statistical Lexicon
July 16, 2014 
A.Due east. Maloof/Associated Press
For hockey fans of a certain era, information technology was the unmarried well-nigh of import goaltending statistic.
Goals-against average, generally reduced to the acronym, GAA, is simple to calculate. Information technology's but the number of goals allowed by a goaltender over hour of play; i.e. the total number of goals allowed per full-length game.
It's an former idea, going all the way back to the birth of the NHL. When Toronto (just Toronto; the squad had no official name in 1917-xviii because it was a stand up-in for the Eddie Livingstone-owned team that was barred from the league) won the Stanley Cup in 1918, they used just 12 skaters all season and starter Hap Holmes posted a 4.73 GAA.
That'due south ancient history, of grade. In a roundabout manner, that'southward the point. GAA is a relic of the past, a statistic with no value outside the historical for the entirety of my lifetime—a dated reference that should accept been dropped around the same time Render of the Jedi opened in theatres.
George Widman/Associated Press
In 1983-84, the NHL started tracking the salvage per centum of goaltenders league-wide. The new statistic was non only plain superior to GAA, but rendered its forebear completely redundant.
This is obvious if we think about what GAA really is: relieve percentage plus noise.
Allow's consider a hypothetical instance: A goaltender who plays a full sixty-minute hockey game and makes 27 saves on 30 shots. Obviously, his GAA his three.00 (3 goals/1 lx-minute game) and his salve percentage is 0.900 (27 saves/xxx shots).
Just we tin can also summate his GAA another way. A goalie'southward save percent is always going to take a fixed relationship to his opposition'due south shooting per centum; in this instance, the 0.900 save percentage ways that the opposing team scored on 10.0 pct of their shots. If we multiply that number by the total number of shots faced per game, we also stop upward with our goalie's GAA (0.one * 30 shots per game = three.00).
In other words, GAA is just a goalie's save per centum combined with the number of shots the team in front end of him immune.
Jim McIsaac/Getty Images
The latter number tin best be described every bit "dissonance."
A goaltender has no influence on the number of initial shots he faces. Some goalies allow more than rebounds than others, merely at the NHL level the gap is so small as to have no practical effect; every bit Rob Pettapiece of NHL Numbers notes, the regression is so severe that an analyst is better off predicting an NHL-boilerplate control rate rather than drawing any inference from an unabridged flavor of play.
Naturally, if GAA is just salve percent plus a bunch of factors outside of a goalie's control, it follows that save percentage is a manifestly superior statistic for measuring goalie functioning. GAA adds nix that salve per centum doesn't already cover, and the addition of noise simply serves to obscure a goalie's true talent.
We shouldn't utilise GAA at all. Information technology should exist dropped from all discussions of goaltender achievement, it shouldn't show up in printing releases from teams or reports in newspapers or even online annotate sections. Stats lines shouldn't even include it.
For 30 years at present, the NHL and the people who cover information technology have been referencing a statistic that adds nothing to the conversation, one that really serves to confuse rather than clarify. It's time that stopped.
Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work.
Statistics courtesy of Hockey-Reference.com.
What Is Goals Against Average,
Source: https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2132316-goals-against-average-should-be-abolished-from-the-nhls-statistical-lexicon
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