Who Really Deserves the Vezina?

2021 was a year of wearing masks and taking shots in the arm. Business as usual for goaltenders.

Ok, ok, I’ll admit there were some strange things about the 2021 NHL regular season. The first is that it was simply the 2021 regular season; no mention of 2020 at all (and good riddance), because the pandemic-shortened 56-game schedule began in January. That regular season is still going on, by the way, and won’t finish until some teams complete the third game of their first-round playoff series.

Regular-season awards voting is traditionally done before the playoffs begin to avoid playoff performances biasing voters. That won’t happen this year, as ballots are due on May 20, and it’s impossible to know what the effect might be: we’ll discuss that in a future article predicting the Vezina winner.

Another strange and important wrinkle in this season is that teams only played others within their (newly minted) divisions. Teams always play within their division and conference more often than outside them, but this season was essentially four leagues playing in parallel with no crossover whatsoever. Weird.

All of these COVID-19 accommodations have made it especially difficult to draw apples-to-apples comparisons among the top goalies in the NHL.

How can we know with any certainty which goaltending performance was the best when every goalie faced a maximum of only six or seven teams?

In short, we can’t.

However, a winner will still be chosen, and analyzing solid performance data is the fairest and most reliable way to do it.