# Goalie Start Board

The goalie start board answers three questions from three separate sources, and it keeps them separate on purpose.

**Who is in the net tonight.** The starting-goalie board is read from the Daily Faceoff starting-goalies page at build time. The five labels are the source's own: Confirmed, Probable, Unconfirmed, Projected and Unknown. They are normalised once, in one function, with the unconfirmed test running first, because the string "unconfirmed" contains "confirm" and a careless substring match promotes every unconfirmed goaltender to a confirmed one. When the page carries no games, the board reports itself dark and prints the reason. It never publishes an empty list as if it were a slate.

**Who has the crease.** When the league is dark the board becomes the crease wall: all 32 clubs, the projected starter for each, and the tandem share drawn as a bar. The projected starter comes from the club's own projected lineup file where one exists, and otherwise from the most-started goaltender of the completed 2025-26 season in our own game logs. Which basis was used is printed on every club, because a projection is not a confirmation.

**What the season actually looked like.** Season lines, the last ten starts, and the home, road and days-rest splits are counted from the NHL's own per-game rows in `data/nhl-player-gamelogs/`: decision, shots against, goals against, minutes. Rest is measured between a goaltender's own appearances, not the club's schedule. One day or less is the back-to-back bucket, two days the next, three or more the last. Qualification is the same volume rule the fantasy desk uses, 15 or more games in 2025-26 or 40 across the three-season window, so a hot twelve-start backup does not lead the board.

**NHL Edge** figures come from four league endpoints: `goalie-save-percentage-detail`, `goalie-5v5-detail`, `goalie-shot-location-detail` and `cat/edge/goalie-detail`. Field names on the page are the league's own, and the percentiles beside them are the league's too. Nothing is converted, ranked or blended here.

There is no composite goalie score anywhere on this page. Save percentage, goals-against average, wins and the last ten nights are four separate columns, sorted one at a time, and the reader does the judging.