In his NHL debut, Michal Postava stopped 89.3% of shots after being called up from the Grand Rapids Griffins (AHL) under emergency conditions.

Thanks the NHL and Roger's in Canada, NHL hockey is now too expensive. What a terrible business model... Screw your customers with very expensive streaming costs.

If my math is correct, that's a 3 points per game avg

Crowd is absolutely livid

Vancouver builds the best tanks. Full stop.

https://xcancel.com/NHLPR/status/2114176512798949447

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which fans at the arenas are nice and which are mean?

The plus/minus statistic has been part of hockey for decades, and I understand the idea behind it. The goal is to measure a player’s contribution to his team’s goal differential by tracking whether his team scores or concedes goals while he is on the ice.

On the surface, that makes sense. Hockey is a game of scoring goals and preventing them. If a team consistently outscores its opponents, that generally indicates success. So it seems reasonable to examine whether a player’s team is outscoring the opposition when that player is on the ice.

But this raises an important question: Does being on the ice when a goal is scored or conceded accurately measure an individual player’s value to his team?

I don’t think it’s that simple.

The Hypothesis Behind Plus/Minus

The underlying hypothesis is that a player’s value can be partly measured by whether his team outscores its opponents while he is on the ice.

The problem is that plus/minus records an outcome without adequately explaining the circumstances that produced it.
Imagine a defenseman who makes the correct defensive read, takes away a passing lane, and forces an opponent into a low-quality shot. The goaltender allows the goal, and the defenseman receives a minus. Did the goal happen while he was on the ice? Yes. Does that automatically mean he played poorly? No.

The reverse can happen, too. A player makes a poor defensive decision or turns the puck over, but his team scores at the other end before the sequence results in a goal against. He might receive a plus despite having made a mistake.
The statistic records what happened, but it doesn’t tell us whether the individual player made the right decisions.

The Team Factor

Hockey is an interconnected sport. A player’s performance is influenced by his teammates, his goaltender, the quality of the opposition, and the role he is asked to play.

A defenseman on an elite team that consistently controls possession and generates scoring chances may accumulate a strong plus/minus partly because of the environment around him. Meanwhile, a capable defenseman on a struggling team might finish with a negative rating despite performing his responsibilities well.

Consider two defensemen. One finishes the season at +20 on a dominant team, while another finishes at −5 on a struggling team and regularly faces the opposition’s best forwards.
Can we confidently conclude that the first defenseman is better simply because of that 25-point difference? I don’t think we can.

We need to examine their individual performances, assignments, and circumstances before drawing that conclusion.

What Plus/Minus Doesn’t Capture

Traditional plus/minus also excludes power-play goals scored by a player’s team, even though power-play production is a significant part of offensive value.

Beyond scoring, the statistic doesn’t adequately capture defensive positioning, puck management, the ability to defend the rush, winning battles, disrupting passing lanes, or limiting high-quality scoring chances.

Those things matter. A player can do many of them well without necessarily receiving positive credit in his plus/minus rating.

This is particularly relevant when evaluating defensemen. A negative rating doesn’t automatically make someone a defensive liability, just as a positive rating doesn’t automatically make someone a great defender.