I happened to notice a while ago that Matt Vinc and Nick Rose had very similar stats lines over their careers. Vinc’s career GAA is 10.73, Rose’s is 10.53. Vinc’s save percentage is 78.8%, Rose’s is 78.6%. Each was ahead of the other in these stats in some seasons. But Vinc has won an amazing eight Goaltender of the Year awards and is widely considered the GOAT, while Rose has been a finalist four times but hasn’t won any. Does it make sense that Vinc’s stats were that similar to Rose’s but Vinc has received far more accolades?

Another factor here is that Vinc’s teams have won three Championships and gone to four more, while Rose’s Rock has only made it to the finals once since he joined the team, and they lost.

I started to wonder: what if Nick Rose is actually the better goalie, considering he played for less successful teams but still pulled off the same stats? It seems unlikely but if it’s true, can I prove it?

First, we’ll skip Rose’s time with Boston and Calgary since he was a backup in both places and didn’t get a lot of playing time. Also, Vinc had won two Goaltender of the Year awards by the time Rose first pulled on a Rock jersey. So that we’re comparing apples to apples, we’ll just look at the years 2012-2023 for both goalies. This includes the truncated 2020 season. We won’t include 2024 since it’s in progress, and the non-existent 2021 season shouldn’t affect anything. We’ll separate the regular season and playoff stats as well.

Regular season

From 2012-2023, Vinc had an overall GAA of 10.63, while Rose’s was 10.61. Each had a single year where their GAA was over 12. Rose had four seasons under 10, Vinc had two. Vinc had a save percentage of 79.21%, Rose was at 78.44%. Rose was over 80% four times, Vinc six.

Vinc had a win-loss record of 106-64 (42 games above .500), while Rose was 93-58 (35 games above .500). But 2012 was Rose’s first year as a starter and he only started 6 games, and in 2015 he was platooning with Brandon Miller so he only started half the games. But in my opinion, the win-loss record is a team stat and is rather meaningless for a goalie. We’ve seen plenty of occasions where a goalie has given up 15 goals and won, and other times given up 8 goals and lost. Let’s ignore that.

Playoffs

Now we’ll look at the playoffs. This is a bit less apples vs. apples since Vinc’s teams missed the playoffs three times from 2012-2023, while Rose’s teams missed four times. Vinc went to the Championship game an amazing seven times in that span, while Rose only made it once. Vinc’s playoff minutes are almost triple Rose’s.

During this span, Vinc has a playoff GAA of 10.21 in 2051:53 minutes, with a save percentage of 79.47%. Rose’s GAA is 13.12 in 706:06 minutes with a save percentage of 73.12%.

Advanced stats

So far, there’s nothing that really tells us that one is significantly better than the other – in the regular season. In the playoffs, though, things are different. Vinc’s numbers are much better than Rose’s and when I saw that, my first thought was that this is unfair because Rose has played a third as much time in the playoffs as Vinc has. But I don’t think that’s valid; the reason Rose has played fewer minutes is because Vinc’s playoff numbers are much better. For a goaltender, playing well in the playoffs usually means you get to keep going, playing badly means you’re done.

But we can use another stat to do some more advanced analysis. The GSAA (Goals Saved Above Average) is a stat originally used for hockey goalies, but can be used for lacrosse as well. It is a way to compare a goalie’s performance to an “average” goalie by telling you how many more saves this goalie would make than a league average goalie when facing the same number of shots. This takes playing time and shots faced as well as the overall quality of the forwards in the league out of the equation so comparisons are meaningful. Basically, any positive number means a goalie is performing better than average, while a negative number means he’s performing worse than average, and the higher the number, the better.

I don’t think this stat is shown on either Cooper Perkins’s LaxMetrics site (he has one called Goals Prevented over Average (GPoA) which is similar but that’s about the number of goals allowed rather than saves made) and it’s not on my nllstats.com site either. But it is on Ty Merrow’s TyMer Lacrosse site. I got the idea for using this from Ty and he gave me details on how to calculate it.

Since 2012, Matt Vinc had a GSAA below 0 in only one season, and significantly above zero (20+) in five of them. Rose was under 0 in four seasons, but was only above 20 twice. Vinc’s GSAA was higher than Rose’s in nine of those eleven seasons. Overall, Vinc had a GSAA of 170.40 while Rose’s was 85.29. Rose was very good, but Vinc was amazing.

There are lots of other interesting goalie stats on both Cooper’s and Ty’s sites that could be used to compare the two, but the numbers are only available for the last couple of seasons. That’s definitely useful for comparing seasons, but the numbers above are comparing an entire decade worth of lacrosse.

In addition to the GSAA discrepancy, what’s interesting here is something I alluded to earlier but didn’t explicitly say: Vinc’s playoff stats are better than his regular season stats, while Rose’s are worse. Does Vinc step up in the playoffs when the games matter more? Meanwhile does Rose fold under the pressure of those more meaningful games? The numbers don’t (and can’t) say either of those things. But having watched both of them that whole time, I would say yes and no. Yes, Matt Vinc steps up in the playoffs. But no, Rose is not a “fold under pressure” kind of goalie. While Vinc’s strong play in the playoffs partially explains his extra minutes, it’s still true that Rose has played in a much lower number of playoff games, so a bad game or two will affect his numbers much more than they would Vinc’s.

Rather than say “the numbers tell us what we already knew”, let’s phrase it as “the numbers confirmed our suspicions”. Sorry Rosey, I love ya but if we combine the last eleven seasons, Matt Vinc was the better goalie.