Photo by Michael Miller, via Wikimedia Commons
I couldn’t find this data (if it’s out there, please point me to it), so I went back to 1987 and pulled goaltender performance vs games rest. We knew goalies did poorly in the second game of a back-to-back pair, but I’m surprised to see such a large gap for two and three games. (The overall dataset is roughly 40000 games.)
| Days between Games | % of Games | Mins (G1) | Mins (G2) | Shots Vs (G1) | Shots Vs (G2) | Sv% (G1) | Sv% (G2) | W% (G1) | W% (G2) |
| 1 | 9.5 | 54.7 | 55.0 | 28.9 | 29.7 | 0.905 | 0.897 | 0.498 | 0.421 |
| 2 | 35.6 | 57.0 | 56.8 | 28.7 | 28.7 | 0.908 | 0.901 | 0.522 | 0.486 |
| 3 | 19.2 | 57.1 | 56.7 | 29.0 | 29.0 | 0.905 | 0.900 | 0.514 | 0.481 |
| 4 | 12.1 | 56.7 | 56.3 | 29.2 | 28.7 | 0.899 | 0.898 | 0.477 | 0.487 |
| 5 | 7.2 | 55.4 | 55.2 | 29.0 | 28.8 | 0.892 | 0.899 | 0.440 | 0.448 |
There are lots of systematic issues here (e.g. most back-to-back games are on the road) but simplistically, this would mean goalie rest obscures the bulk of a goaltender’s value. That seems implausible and worth looking at in more detail…
Hockey Graphs 