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Comparing Marc-Andre Fleury's Red Hot Start To Year's Past

November 3, 2015, 11:46 AM ET [132 Comments]
Ryan Wilson
Pittsburgh Penguins Blogger • RSSArchiveCONTACT
After falling into an 0-3 to begin the season the Penguins have won seven of eight games. A big reason for that has not been improved play by the team, but the goaltending of Marc-Andre Fleury.

Marc-Andre Fleury is one of the hottest goaltenders in the NHL this season no matter what the metric of choice is.




adjGSAA/60's purpose as a tool is a baseline comparison that makes it easier to look at a list of goalies and determine as definitively as possible, regardless of circumstance, and in consideration of the tools we have and the variables we can actually account for, Goalie A is performing better than Goalie B.


As you can see Fleury is better than a lot of goalies through ten games this year.

Naturally I wanted to go back and look if Marc-Andre Fleury has ever started out a season this hot. I used War-On-Ice's date range tool to track down Fleury's 5v5 adjusted save percentages for the first ten games of each season since 2007-08. I then looked at where Fleury finished that season.

AdjustedSvPct: Adjusted save percentage; this adjusts for the fact that some teams give up more high-quality shots, while others give up more low-quality shots. This is the weighted-average of SvPctHigh, SvPctMed, and SvPctLow, where the weights correspond to the league-wide percentage of shots from each of those areas. In other words, this is a goalies save percentage if they faced a league average proportion of shots from each of the three shooting zones (high, medium, and low probability of success).




This is indeed the best start to a season Marc-Andre Fleury has ever had during the 2007-15 sample size. In fact the last three years are his three best starts to a season with each recent year better than the last.

To nobody's surprise because goaltenders never make sense Fleury's best full seasons came in the years where he had his slowest starts (2007-08 and 2010-11). The 2007-08 season remains Fleury's career year. His numbers were outstanding and the trio of Crosby, Malkin, and Fleury were the only reason Pittsburgh found any kind of playoff success. Their possession numbers were atrocious under Michael Therrien.

Tim Thomas holds the best single season mark in adjusted save percentage in this time frame. Thomas' ridiculous 2010-11 saw him finish the regular season with an adjusted save percentage of .950.

Fleury currently has a .949 adjusted save percentage in 2015-16.

It remains to be seen where Fleury's season goes from here but to this point his numbers are as good as a goalie can be.

*Bonus info. Here are the leaders in overall adjusted save percentage from 2007-present with a minimum of 5,000 minutes played*



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