Wild About Numbers: No More Excuses For Niklas Backstrom

As you all know, Backstrom arrived in Minnesota back in 2006-07 from Europe as a 29 year old, which is actually past a goalie's normal prime. While it's not concrete, research has suggested that a goalie's peak performance occurs between 23 and 26, and they rarely improve after that.

He had an amazing first year, leading the league in 5v5 Sv% and recording 5 shut-outs. Between that season and this one, he has had erratic results, to put it mildly.

-Here are each of his seasons along with his 5v5 Sv% and where it ranked among league goaltenders that year:

-Here are the above results in graph form:

As you can see, Backstrom's Sv% has been all over the place, but after a couple of good seasons in 2010/11 and 2011/12, it has plummeted in the last 2 years.

-Here is his rolling 5v5 Sv%, game-by-game from last season:

He started the year pretty consistently, but after that the graph gets very erratic and this trend continues right up to the end of the season.

-To further explore this point, here is last season broken down into 4 parts, along with Backstrom's TOI and 5v5Sv%:

It's clear that he was better in the first half of the season than the second, but his worst period was between games 22 and 31, with his performance actually recovering somewhat down the stretch for the final 11 games of the year.

It's hard to come-up with a definite answer as to whether or not it was an extraordinary workload that was to blame for Backstrom's poor season but, for comparison's sake, let's see how his TOI stacked-up against the minutes played by other starters in the league.

-Here are the top 10 goalies in terms of TOI last season:

Five goalies played the same amount of games as Backstrom, and five played more minutes. There appears to be no trend in terms of the effect of a heavy workload. Pavelec, Nabokov, Bryzgalov and Backstrom were bad, but Lundqvist, Rinne, Howard, Miller, Bobrovsky and Niemi were very good, so it seems that results were down to talent more than workload.

-Here are NHL goalies with 500+ minutes player this year ranked by Shots Against Per 20 Minutes:

You could say age is a factor, with the younger goalies having more stamina and therefore being better equipped to face more shots, but the likes of Miller and Roberto Luongo are facing a higher rate of shots against than Backstrom and doing just fine in spite of their age.

There's every chance that Backstrom can get out of this funk and return to something close to his 2011/12 performance, but with his age, and around 60 games of mediocrity in his recent history, the odds are against him.

With Josh Harding now on IR, there's no more time for excuses; Backstrom just needs to get it done.

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