The Dallas Stars lost to the Winnipeg Jets last night, falling 4-1 in a game that felt like a statement about the state of the Central Division title race.
Dallas had a 25-22 edge in shots, which prompted plenty of online discourse comparing Connor Hellebuyck and Jake Oettinger and the fans in Winnipeg made it an IRL conversation chanting “Helley’s backup” at the Stars goaltender in reference to the depth chart for Team USA at the 4 Nations Face-Off.
I’m sure the Stars goalie heard those chants, he hears everything, it’s one of the reasons Oettinger loves playing on the road. He relishes the chance to silence a home crowd. It’s also one of the reasons, mentality wise, he has no issue publicly claiming he wants to be one of the best goalies in the world.
And at this point, Oettinger and Hellebuyck are in different universes.
Hellebuyck is doing Dominik Hašek-level stuff right now.
He’s leading the league with a .927 save percentage, 26 points above the league average. When Hašek won the Hart as the league MVP during the 1997-98 season his league-leading .932 save percentage was 26 points above league average.
Hellebuyck is on pace to win the triple crown of goaltending statistics — wins, save percentage, and goals against average — by a large margin, which is how Carey Price won the Hart during the 2014-15 season.
Hellebuyck is the best goalie on the planet right now, he should be the league MVP in my view.
This brings us back to Oettinger, who by his own words and ambitions wants to be in Hellebuyck’s orbit.
Oettinger has been questioned publicly on social media frequently, including commenters on the DLLS Podcast asking whether Casey DeSmith should be considered a viable option as the No. 1 goalie in Dallas.
So today, I wanted to take a look and provide some context on Oettinger’s season.
First some raw numbers.
Oettinger ranks 16th in the league with a .907 save percentage, he is second in the league with 30 wins, and 12th with a 2.52 goals against average.
By those numbers and his usage, statistically speaking, Oettinger is a top-15 goalie in the NHL this season. Not a top-5 or top-10 goalie, but a top-15 goalie in a league where 94 goalies have played at least one game this season.
And across the league this has, again, statistically speaking, been a historically bad year for the position.
As of Saturday morning, NHL league-wide save percentage was .901, the lowest since the 2005-06 season which came after an NHL lockout and new rules to increase offense.
That league-wide average has consistently dropped since the 2015-16 season when it was a modern-era best .915 in back-to-back seasons.
In the past 10 seasons we’ve seen save percentage plummet 14 points, from .915 to .901 this season across the league.
Goalies are also having more bad games this season.
Hockey Reference tracks Really Bad Starts, games where a goalie has a .850 save percentage or lower. In such games a team has a less than 10 percent chance of winning according to Los Angeles Kings director of Analytics Rob Vollman, who coined the stat.
This season there have already been 79 really bad starts across the league according to Hockey Reference. During the 2022-23 season there were 88 across the league and last season there were 86.
With roughly a month to play, it’s highly likely that the number or really bad starts in the NHL this season will cross over 90.
Statistically speaking, the position is worse off than it’s been in 20 years.
Now we need to use that data and framing to get a better read on Oettinger.
Oettinger has 11 really bad starts this season, tied for third-most in the league with Sam Montembeault and trailing only Igor Shesterkin (12) and Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen (14).
Unlike the others, though, Oettinger has consistently delivered quality starts. A quality start, again defined by Vollman, is one where the goalie achieves league average save percentage — or if he faces 20 shots or less and has a save percentage of .885 or higher in a game.
So for the 2024-25 season, a quality start is any game where a goalie posted a .901 or higher.
Oettinger ranks third in the league with 29 quality starts, only trailing Hellebuyck (39), Andrei Vasilevskiy (33), and Filip Gustavsson (31).
When it comes to quality start percentage, Oettinger ranks 11th in the league amongst goalies that have played 25 games or more, delivering a quality start 61.7 percent of the time.
So, statistically speaking, like the other raw data, Oettinger is probably in the top-10 to 15 range of NHL goalies this season.
This is where narrative comes into play.
Look at these two side-by-side stat lines.
Two practically identical goalies, right?
One is obviously Jake Oettinger, the other is Florida Panthers goalie Sergei Bobrovsky.
There isn’t a public clamoring or discourse about whether the Panthers goaltending is good enough to win the Stanley Cup, while the same numbers are causing concern in Dallas — that’s the power of narrative and having a Stanley Cup ring on your finger, like Bobrovsky does.
Now, this brings us to the question of how we can quantify “clutch” and “big-game goalie.”
AKA Which goalie can mentally put up a wall in the biggest games and deliver?
It’s a philosophy that led to Jordan Binnington’s selection as Canada’s No. 1 goalie at 4 Nations and one that’s being celebrated after he delivered, multiple times, in overtime of the championship game.
Binnington will live off that game and his 2019 Stanley Cup championship for the rest of his career, he will forever be in the “winner” category for Hockey Canada because of those two games.
Aside from one playoff series in Calgary, Oettinger hasn’t consistently passed the “clutch” eye test. For example, when the Stars lost to the Edmonton Oilers in the Western Conference Finals in 2024, he was outplayed on the other end of the ice by Stuart Skinner.
This is where he and Hellebuyck are actually similar, there are several in the hockey world who look at the Jets lack of playoff experience and ask, “Can Hellebuyck be that same guy in the postseason?”
In reality it’s all about the perception.
You aren’t a winner until you’ve won something, and until you do, they’ll always be questions about whether you actually have the mettle to do so.
Oettinger doesn’t get the big-game benefit of the doubt because he doesn’t have a signature championship moment, and too much time has passed since that Calgary series where it becomes the outlier for many.
Your view of Oettinger is also framed by your view of goaltending — are you frequently looking for mistakes or are you looking for excellence?
Because if you watch Oettinger regularly, which has become part of my job, you can easily find both. His puck tracking can seem off early in games, his post work sometimes feels out of sorts. But then he also makes many difficult saves look routine, there are moments that Oettinger doesn’t get credit for because of how well he’s read the play in advance to anticipate the shot.
I think all of this context is important, because it’s high time right now for overreaction, especially with the NHL playoffs a month away.
Oettinger is a good enough goalie to win the Stanley Cup. In fact, if you were to draft the eight likely starting goalies in the Western Conference for the playoffs, he’d probably get drafted third or fourth.
He’s not close to the best-in-the world conversation, and that framing — put out there by the goalie himself — hasn’t done him any favors. But in a collection of seasons where the position has been picked apart by shooters at a higher level than before, Oettinger is actually treading water extremely well while having to swim upstream.
This isn’t to shape your opinion one way or the other, you can believe Oettinger is or isn’t the guy.
But hockey fandom, in general, is very tribal, fans understand the trials and tribulations of their team, but rarely realize that 20 other fanbases are dealing with the same problem.
Without a proper conclusion, I think the best point here is that context matters.
