[Caged Great]

The thing with Gillies, is that he has a quick glove, a quick blocker, gets down quickly, gets up quickly and is positionally sound. Plus he's so big that he takes up the entire net. There was one drill during the July camp where Gillies was on his knees huging the post and there was only about 2 inches between his shoulder and the crossbar, so there's basically nothing to shoot at if he's facing shooters from the top of the crease. The only area of weakness is his side to side movement, which is as bad as Luongo's (who's not terrible for a larger goalie). The only reliable way that he was scored on back in July was when he was forced to move side to side. Beyond that it was mostly save after save.

If he continues to progress as he has been, he could very well be a top 5 goalie in the league, if not a perennial contender for the Vezina. With all of his secondary skills being well above average he, at the worst, should develop into an average starter.

I like goalies a lot (hence my user name), and from the prospects I've watched there were only a couple that I liked as much with their game before they became NHLers (Miller, Lundqvist, Quick, and Fredrik Andersen were the others) If he becomes as good as any of those guys in the NHL then we're going to be set in net for a long long time