“There is no position in sport as noble as goaltending.”
When Vladislav Tretiak said that, he knew very well that every win is the goal-scorer’s and every loss is the goaltender’s.
It's a mostly thankless job. It's a position that had been judged for years using goals-against average with no context to the goals. Even with today's advanced analytics, it's hard to accommodate fully for the context of shots. So what about the old-school eye test?
Sometimes when a goalie looks like they had no chance, it's because they made mistakes leading up to the shot that put them way out of position.