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Matteo · 01-02-2023, 10:26 PM

Hello all, this is my 100th thread on the site, and it only feels right that it's on yet another piece of goalie media. I've done many of these but this will likely be my last, at least for awhile.

Introduction

I made a similar article to the one you're about to read after the first season of the new Franchise Hockey Manager 8 era, which you can see here if you want, but you don't really need to since today I'll be covering most of what was in that article and more. The main difference here is that I'll only be looking at starting goalies or "1A's" in a tandem. I'm also ignoring goalies who are below 155 TPE since with rule changes they'll be gone soon anyways.

We're now three seasons deep into the FHM 8 era, which means that we have a the beginnings of a decent sample size to start talking about what works and what doesn't for goalies in this new sim engine. In this article I'll be doing a deep dive into the goalie position, looking at every attribute to see what works and what doesn't in both the regular season and postseason.

Before I get into it though, I want to address something, the age-old question of 'does goalie TPE matter?' After my first season FHM 8 article, it didn't look good. High TPE goalies were doing poorly, low TPE goalies were winning awards, and there seemed to be hardly any correlation between earning TPE and getting a decent save percentage. I'm here to report that, whether that it was just a bad season for goalies, or that the lowering of the scoring slider actually did something, there is actually a little bit more of a positive correlation now between TPE and performance in both the regular and postseasons across all three seasons:

[Image: eRKC1XH.png]

As you can see, in the regular season, a team rolling out a 155 TPE inactive as their starter can expect them to put up an average of between a .885 and .890 save percentage, while someone paying $6 million for that high contract tier goalie can expect a .900 save percentage out of them. In the playoffs, the difference is approximately double this, being a .880 versus a .900 save percentage. That difference seems small, but let's say your team is allowing 30 shots against per game. A low TPE goalie in this case would allow an average of one more goal every two games. I should also say that I'll be using save percentage as a measure of how well a goalie performs. It isn't perfect but without stats like goals saved above expected in the index it's the best and the easiest I can do.

Now obviously most teams would rather spend $6 million on a forward who will likely be at or above a point per game rather than a goalie who can lower their goals against per game by 0.5, but a high TPE goalie definitely does provide some value to teams. My ideal solution for this would be for only half of goalies' salaries to count against their team's cap, but I digress. All of this is to say that TPE isn't a major hinderance to teams, as shown here (though it's possible that GMs acquire high TPE goalies to improve their teams and it isn't actually the goalie making the team better, it's just that they're all on good teams):

[Image: sexW0NP.png]

Going deeper than the surface level TPE difference between goalies, I have also found that which attributes they allocate their TPE into also contributes to their success by a sizable amount. Even beyond this there seems to be a big difference in which attributes were found in the most successful regular season goalies versus the most elite playoff performers. Because of this I'll have one section where I talk about the regular season, and one where I talk about playoffs, as well as what builds would be the most successful in both.

Before I do though, I want do get this next part out of the way. It's important to note that no matter what you do, the fact of life for a goalie is that your performance will be always determined by factors outside your control far more than things you can change on a season-to-season basis. You can adjust your attributes to give yourself a fighting chance at playing how you want, but in the end things like your team, tactics, and luck play an even bigger part in your performance.

[Image: mesnrkn.png]

Without considering any TPE or attributes, I found that a goalie's team is the largest measurable factor in how well they will perform. In the regular season can be the difference between a .880 save percentage and a .910, and in the playoffs the gap is even larger at .865 versus .920.

Let's ignore this for now though, as believe it or not this was all just the introduction. We'll now get into the real meat of the article, starting with what's needed for someone wanting to create a goalie who will have the best chance at a great regular season.

Regular Season: Here for a Good Time not a Long Time

The title I've chosen to give to this type of goalie is a poking a little bit of fun. There are a few reasons why someone would place the most value on having the best regular season, whether it's because their team is in a tight push for a playoff spot, they want to secure the President's Trophy, or they just want to win some individual awards. All of these are 100% valid ways to build a goalie and/or exist on the site, and still absolutely helps their teams, even if it's more in the regular season than the playoffs. Goalies are the one position that teams can afford to experiment with anyways.

This goalie build looks pretty similar to the archetypal FHM 6 goalie from the top to bottom, starting with the two most important attributes, positioning and rebounds.

[Image: OsFs9eY.png]

Not a ton that's groundbreaking here. Most hockey fans will tell you that they're happy if their favourite team has a boring goalie who is always in the right place and doesn't give many 2nd or 3rd chances, which is exactly what we have here. After this comes recovery, reflexes, glove, and low shots.

[Image: m9ulaat.png]

Again not anything super out of the ordinary here, and pretty keeping with what we've seen from successful goalies in FHM 6. Goalies that get back well after being out of position, that are quick to react, and that are strong with their catcher and pads perform well. What seemed a little bit strange to me was that rather being on a tier with glove and low shots, blocker belongs in a tier with mental toughness and stamina.

[Image: gSmVMXc.png]

Still more or less exactly what we've seen from FHM 6. The two "mental" stats are interesting to me, since I thought the ability to mentally recover would be more important. Stamina is especially interesting though as I suspect that given more data this trendline would actually be a curve. I would think that a starter with extremely low stamina (which we haven't seen yet in this era) would do extremely poorly, and also increasing stamina past a certain point wouldn't make too much of a difference. What I found the most interesting though is what the data showed for the least important goalie attributes, poke checking, puckhandling, passing, and skating.

[Image: HIpHwnc.png]

What surprised me here wasn't that these were the least important attributes, on some level most goalies already knew that. What surprised me was that putting TPE into any of these so far has appeared to have a net zero or even negative impact on goalies during the regular season. I'm not sure what the reason for this is, maybe it's because goalies are getting tired with these extra curriculars, or maybe it's the trapezoid, but for whatever reason it seems like goalies would be better off leaving all these attributes at 5.

So there you have it, the Here for a Good Time not a Long Time build, the regular season hero, the McBride winner. I quickly threw together what a build of this type would look like for someone just getting called up from juniors to be their SHL team's starter. It's definitely not the most balanced build, with no TPE put into the four least important attributes, but according to what I've found it should do alright (DISCLAIMER: I do not take responsibility for builds that don't work).

Now that we've looked at how to build a goalie who excels in the regular season, let's look at one who performs in the playoffs.

Playoffs: The Cup Chaser

The Cup Chaser title is apt for this following build, since while there are similarities to a regular season performer, there are also some fundamental differences that might hinder them a little bit before the playoffs start. Not so much so that this goalie is lacing up forward skates and maxing out skating, passing, and puckhandling to become a 6th skater mind you, although that would be cool, but for sure some things that one would look at in FHM 6 and scratch their head.

The top three most important attributes for this goalie are, somewhat strangely, glove, followed by low shots, and then blocker.

[Image: 37LQ1Tw.png]

So right off the bat here I'm picturing Dominik Hasek, no structure just saves, and I like it. I don't have much else to say about this so far other than I feel like unless we have some major outliers, I feel like the Dominator build must have been 100% what OOTP was going for here. Following being able to make saves with any part of the body comes the structure, positioning and reflexes.

[Image: HkpEbdX.png]

Being at the perfect place to stop the puck wasn't really Hasek's bread and butter, but being fast enough to get them anyways definitely was. These two stats were also considered by most to be the most important to an FHM 6 goalie, which makes sense. Following these are a few more important FHM 6 attributes, mental toughness, rebound, and recovery.

[Image: 4JINqEM.png]

Mental toughness is a stat that I thought might be among the most important in the playoffs, though I suppose that it only accounts for a goalie's ability to bounce back after allowing a goal against, not their ability to bounce back after losing an important game. The other two stats here aren't much of a surprise other than the fact that they're lower than the three most important stats that we discussed for this build. This is also where the lines for 'tiers' of attributes begin to blur for this build, as next up are poke checking, stamina, and skating.

[Image: xnR7lsg.png]

These are two strange attributes for stamina to be sandwiched in between, although I suspect that it's in part due to the fact that some of the starters whose data was used only played four games before being eliminated. Something that's also notable here is that even though they were either negative or non-contributors to goalie success in the regular season, poke checking and skating were both more positive in the playoffs. The final two attributes which were negative contributors in the regular season are passing and puckhandling.

[Image: 15EMxAn.png]

While neither of these attributes are strongly correlated to strong playoff performances, neither are negatively correlated, which is good news since it means that throwing those final few TPE into either of these when there isn't enough for anything else doesn't hurt, and might actually even help a little bit. Still though, given the choice between getting one of these from 5 to 13 or getting something like glove from 19 to 20, I would choose glove.

So that's the Cup Chaser goalie build, for those who only care about getting the most important trophy in the League, the Challenge Cup. I also made a rookie build for this one, although it has more TPE since they'll have all regular season to prepare for playoffs. It's simultaneously more balanced than the regular season one and also more all over the place which is pretty fitting.

Conclusion

I initially set out on this journey with the goal of keeping up with young goalies coming up like Rebecca Montagne and Willie Miller. I think this has accomplished more than that, maybe we'll even start seeing some diversity in goalie builds.

To close I'd like to give what I would consider to be the most important attributes in a balanced build based on all of this. A build that will do well in both the regular season and the playoffs but not necessarily be the best in either. The order I would put them in from most to least important would be positioning, glove, low shots, reflexes, blocker, rebound, recovery, mental toughness, stamina, poke checking, skating, passing, puckhandling. A balanced build coming out of the juniors would look something like this.

Thank you for reading, if anyone's interesting in seeing my data then here's a link to my Google Sheets, and if the charts are too small then here's a link to an Imgur album containing all of them.

Code:
2200 words, plus data and charts, ready for grading

**JamesT** · 01-02-2023, 11:45 PM

@Matteo

[Image: d1ea0e8f5a7294e8ebb9c2e6513d278d.png]

*CptSquall* · 01-03-2023, 12:42 AM

You know? This is well timed as I was pondering how exactly to build August after his final season in the J coming up.

Samsung virtual assistant · 01-03-2023, 02:14 AM

Big smart

***RAmenAmen*** · 01-03-2023, 02:22 AM

Imagine not cranking your positioning to 20 before your first SHL game

Salming · 01-03-2023, 09:32 AM

Sensational article.

**brickwall35** · 01-03-2023, 10:34 AM

>makes build exactly as suggested here
>garbage in both regular and post season

FHM bad

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