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So often, older players seem to survive based solely on their reputations.  Take the major off-season goaltending moves in Toronto, for instance.  Curtis Joseph was allowed to walk away, and Ed Belfour was brought in to replace him.

Belfour is a significant downgrade from Joseph, but you’ll never hear that, especially in the Toronto-dominated Canadian media.  What you will hear is how he won a Cup in 1999, has two Vezina trophies (but they won’t mention they were a decade ago), has played in five All-Star games and had the league’s best save percentage two years ago.  You will also likely hear about how he had an “off year” in 2002 due to dressing room strife.

Here’s what you won’t hear.  He’s 37 years old, and will be 38 by the end of next year.  The “dressing room strife” excuse contradicts the usual “contract year” talk, so that’s a wash.  Considering his age, it’s more likely the poor performance was the result of the natural degradation of skills due to age.

He did lead the NHL in save percentage in 1999/2000, with a .919 mark.  But the following year he dropped to .905, which ranked 18^th among NHL starters.  Last year he dropped again, to .895, which was dead last among NHL starters.  That’s right, no starting NHL goalie last year had a save percentage worse than Ed Belfour’s.  His was the only mark below .900, in fact.

But that never really seems to matter, does it?  If a player was great once, he is great now.  In Wayne Gretzky’s final year, for example, he was still talked about as if he was still a dominant scorer.  That he scored precisely nine goals is usually overlooked.  Skills degenerate with age, that’s a simple fact of professional athletics.

Another good example of this perceived perpetual greatness is Canada’s 2002 Olympic goaltending.  Patrick Roy would have gone (and should have), but he didn’t want to, so we can’t blame the management for that one.  Joseph, Belfour and Martin Brodeur are an excellent trio…if the Olympics were five years earlier.  Today, there are several goalies who are better, but do not have the same reputation, and therefore were not selected.

Let’s look at the goalies who have played in the NHL each of the last three years, including at least one as a starter.  There are 25 such goaltenders.  Here they are, ranked by average save percentage over those three years (simple, not weighted, average):

So we had #8, #13, and #16, when we could have theoretically had #1, #2 and #5.  Belfour is tied with the “overrated” Roman Turek at #16.  For 2000/01 numbers alone, Joseph is #7, Brodeur is #16 and Belfour is #18.  How can these be optimal selections?  The most mind-boggling non-selection is Sean Burke, He of the Great Save Percentage and Extensive International Experience.  And he’s on Gretzky’s team to boot.  Was Gretzky bullied by Quinn and Hitchcock and Martin?  Perhaps Semenko and McSorley couldn’t attend the meetings.

Myself, I had my fingers crossed for Burke backed up by Jose Theodore, with Roberto Luongo as #3.  And note that one common defence for the selections is completely invalid: “They won, so obviously they were good selections.”  This implies that while the goaltending was not as good as it could have been, it was good enough to win.  This is completely invalid because there was no way of knowing, at the time the selections were made, that it would be enough.

Retrospective evaluation of decision-making is invalid.  Decisions can be evaluated based only on what was known at the time the decision was made.  Therefore, the only apparent reason Canada’s Olympic goaltenders were who they were was their reputations.  And that’s truly confounding because the rest of the team was well selected, seemingly based upon skill and recent, rather than long past, performance.