Five-Star Goalies and Expressly EXPRESS Hockey

Not too long ago, I heard from PLAAY gamer Andrew Cox: "I got your excellent free 1995-96 Hockey Blast card set on the holiday sale and I am enjoying it but have a question for you. The Damian Rhodes goalie card has five shot stars and he is on the worst team in the set, Ottawa. Is this correct? I have playing some games in a project and Ottawa are hard to beat even though they have played some far superior teams and they are by far the weakest team in the set and had a poor season historically."

I told Andrew (jokingly!) that the creator of the card set, John Bergeron, is a big Ottawa fan, so perhaps he rated Rhodes a little better than he should, haha! Totally kidding--John does such good work and is a stickler for detail. I forwarded Andrew's note on to John and sure enough, John got back to us with the scoop post-haste. "Damian Rhodes posted the following stats that season; 36 GP (10-22-4) 2.77 GAA and .906 SV%. He was by far Ottawa's best goalie among the three who played and the Sens finished 18-59-5 that year (editor's note: meaning that when the OTHER Ottawa goalies were in the net, the Senators were 8-37-1!). His PLAAY adjusted GAA per the guide book (after allowing for qualities adjustments, square adjustment and season scoring) is 1.85.

A number of folks have come up with a breakdown of EVERY possible PLAY-SHOT-STAR SAVE combination and the projected GAA each will generate. The "How-To" guide doesn't provide that exhaustive list, although it does provide the means to create your own. Bottom line is, there are different combinations of save stars that will generate the same GAA. John is one who has deciphered all of the possible combinations and feels like five PLAY SAVE stars is the way to go for Rhodes. "Since he had a save percentage above .900 on a really poor team, I'd think that he'd definitely make a lot of first saves and probably give up rebound goals."

John also pointed out that the express game focuses mainly on the PLAY SAVE rating, with less emphasis on the rebound and spectacular saves. This is not an oversight or error, because the full-play game is also primarily driven by the PLAY SAVE rating. I would agree that if someone is JUST playing express, they are going to probably see Rhodes over-perform for a couple of reasons: 1) his PLAY SAVE rating (5) is disparate from his other saves (2.5 stars each) and 2) the express methodology reduces the number of checks by bringing everything to the middle so to speak, so really poor teams (and really good ones) have a somewhat greater chance to be "off" than the middle teams do. This phenomenon is amplified by the relatively few dice rolls required to resolve a game. That's the trade-off with a fast-playing sports game, you have to give up something to get something. I think (hope?) most people are OK with this!

Incidentally, this was the motivation behind including the optional rule of using the SHOT save rating on red die "4" quality checks that generate scoring chances. With as many checks as Ottawa will lose given its dearth of play-making qualities, I think it's a good option for re-creating Rhoades' real-life performance. This idea popped up late in game development (credit to Andy Lewis), but we had been getting such strong play-test results without it that I was hesitant to plug it in as a hard rule. But it certainly seemed to make sense for situations like this.

And what about goalies whose save ratings are zero--should they get some special consideration for express hockey? I'd say yes, if only to add a little drama to the process. One idea is to say that an open/outlined star is the minimum rating for express. That way every goalie would always at least have a chance to stop a scoring threat.

While we’re talking hockey, Andrew had one more question to ask: "Should the Hockey Blast 'underdog boost' rule come into play in playoff games, or just regular season games?" I told Andrew that my feeling is, if a team qualifies for the playoffs AND also the underdog boost, I would instead give the underdog team the "Cinderella Boost" for the playoffs--consider all players on the underdog team to have the STAR quality (double STAR if they have it already). We proposed this rule for the 1990-91 Minnesota North Stars, who finished the regular season in fourth place in their division with a record of 27-39-14, and yet advanced to the championship series, and it worked really well.

(hockey goalie photo credit to Andy Hall, unsplash.com)