Term the glaring issue in Sens’ deal with Korpisalo

The Ottawa Senators knew, in some fashion, that they had to address the goaltending position this off-season.

Coming off a disastrous Matt Murray gambit the year prior, Ottawa tried to cobble together a platoon of Anton Forsberg, Cam Talbot, and prospect Mads Sogaard in 2022-23. That too went poorly, by general manager Pierre Dorion’s own assessment.

Consequently, we expected the Senators to invest in the position, and they did on the opening day of free agency, signing veteran goaltender Joonas Korpisalo to a five-year, $20-million dollar contract. It’s a big commitment for a franchise that’s painstakingly tried to lift itself out of a very lengthy rebuild, and it’s not the first goaltender Dorion has bet on to stabilize the defensive third.

But it may very well be Dorion’s last bet at the position. With an ownership transition on the horizon and the organization entering year seven of its rebuild, there is an obvious and palpable desperation to deliver a contender. And while the organization has reasonably targeted the goaltending position as an area to upgrade, there is a very open question as to whether Korpisalo is the guy who can provide the production they so desperately covet.

One thing about Korpisalo: for a 29-year-old goaltender, Korpisalo has had very limited NHL experience, with just 221 games played since the start of the 2015-16 season. There are three reasons for why Korpisalo has played so infrequently:

Injuries and durability issues, including a hip surgery one year ago.
Playing in a platoon setup, most notably with Columbus’ Elvis Merzlikins.
Inability to sustain high-end performance, with volatile production.

I would argue the second and third points are interrelated to some degree – after all, most goaltenders find themselves in platoons when they cannot differentiate themselves in a meaningful way. And while Korpisalo’s average annual value ($4 million) certainly sits in line with that, a five-year deal may not.

One of the big risks for Ottawa and this contract – one that reminds me of the deal Edmonton signed with Jack Campbell last summer – is that they are wagering on right-tail outcomes, or the “best” of Korpisalo.

Around the time of that Campbell deal, I wrote why organizations should bet on reliability and consistency in net, most exemplified by then-free agent Darcy Kuemper, and least exemplified by, well, Korpisalo. At the time, Korpisalo’s track record was a goaltender who would by and large sink your team’s performance, not elevate it, based on the shot profile faced:

In fairness to Korpisalo, since the time of that post, he’s perhaps off one of his better seasons. He stopped 91.3 per cent of shots in Columbus over 28 games, and after being traded to Los Angeles, followed that up with a 92.1 per cent stop rate with the Kings. All of this data is meaningful, perhaps even more so for a player like Korpisalo, who is still relatively fresh in NHL circles.

What I wanted to do was compare Korpisalo’s ability to steal goals to his peers who have signed recent deals, and we have a few very recent comparables in the last few days – Pittsburgh’s Tristan Jarry signed a lucrative five-year deal, Vegas and Carolina were able to lock in Adin Hill and Frederik Andersen respectively to multi-year contracts, and Edmonton opted to commit three-years to restricted free agent Stuart Skinner

Let’s look at each one head-to-head with the likes of Korpisalo based on how effective they have been erasing goals against based on the shot profile faced, leveraging Evolving Hockey’s Goals Above Replacement model.

Here’s what each distribution looks like:

Each goaltender, at least to date, has outperformed Korpisalo. What’s interesting is you really have a mix of goaltenders with a wide range of experience – whereas Andersen has been a workhorse in this league for years, Jarry has had usage rates eerily similar to that of Korpisalo, and both Skinner and Hill are much more relative unknowns.

But only two of these goaltenders received five-year deals. And therein lies the issue. It’s not that Korpisalo can’t play as well as any one of these other goalies who signed in the last week. He can, and he has. But only Korpisalo and Jarry signed long-term deals.

It very much feels like Ottawa and Dorion are flipping a coin. On one side of the coin is a decent, everyday goaltender you have under contract for five seasons. On the other side of the coin is a goaltender who may lose you a lot of games, also under contract for five seasons.

And therein lies the problem. We have seen both good and bad from Korpisalo, certainly enough for him to continue working in the NHL. But if the price to land a goaltender outplayed by his peers was to sign him to a long-term deal, the team should have considered other options.

The upside here is likely to be muted; the downside potential, however, may be significant.

Data via Natural Stat Trick, NHL.com, Evolving Hockey, Hockey Reference