After a weekend with some stellar goaltending performances across the Australian Ice Hockey League (AIHL), let’s take a look at whether your team has a David Ayers to your Maple Leafs – someone in net who just has your number, no matter how hard you try.

This looks at the period from 2013 to 2023 in the AIHL, so won’t take into account the first part of the 2024 season.

Let’s start with some criteria around this – so we can avoid a situation where a goalie played one game against a team, shut them out and now holds a 1.000 save percentage on 15 shots against a struggling team at the start of April or end of August. This is pretty simple to account for – to qualify, a goalie must have at least 100 minutes played against a team. For most of the period in question that accounts for 2 games – so expect to see some high-quality imports.

The numbers

Table 1 shows the top three goalies by save percentage against each of the ten teams. Clearly, a lot of the import guns who have camped between the pipes over the years feature here – Matt Hewitt alone appears against four different opponents (of the seven he played against), and James Kruger, Troy Davenport and Peter Di Salvo pop up twice. The quality of the goaltending needed to get on these lists is also evident – with the lowest save percentage by any top three goalie being “only” 0.901 – by Jake Doornbos against the Lightning. Curtis Skip of the Ice Dogs is the only goalie in the mix with at least 100 minutes played against an opponent and no blemishes – going at 1.000 against the Adrenaline.

Table 1: Top 3 goalies by opponent, by save percentage

Save percentage is only one of the metrics for a goaltender – the other big one is Goals-Against-Average, or GAA (or wins, but that’s less fun in a table). This is pretty consistent with save percentage – dominated by imports – and imports in strong teams, as you would expect. Hewitt again appears four times, with Troy Davenport three times. There are a few more locals in the mix here as well – and not all of them are Anthony Kimlin.

Table 2: Top 3 goalies by opponent, by GAA

How about the locals?

Looking at the imports above is great, but only 7 of the 30 spots in Table 1 are taken by locals – so let’s strip out the imports and see how locals alone fare for save percentage. Table 3 shows the top three locals against each team – and again, some high-quality performances here. The only team without a local goalie registering over 0.900 against them are the Brave – and with both the strength of the team, and the ‘idiosyncrasies’ of the Brave Cave, that’s probably not surprising.

The usual suspects make appearances across this as well – Anthony Kimlin is in the top three local goalies against 7 teams – including the Sydney Bears, against whom he has the best record of any local goalie. Olivier Martin appears against three teams of the five he played against (having only one season in the period), with Dayne Davis also popping up three times.

Table 3: Top 3 local goalies by opponent, by save percentage

So what?

Honestly, nothing at all. The reality of a lot of this is that the numbers are based on 2-4 games against an opponent, which is barely enough to get a sample – but it might be interesting to see which part-time Zamboni driver is tormenting your team[1].

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[1] As a Leafs fan, this is breaking my last will to live.