Quote:
Originally Posted by GranteedEV
As an aside, this is an interesting commentary on the starter vs backup situation mentioned earlier. 55-60 game starters can have a bad eight game stretch top open their season and it's a blip on the radar for their whole-season aggregate performance. We even saw it with Kipprusoff in some years. Elsewhere, I've noticed it in recent years with guys like Lehtonen, Andersen, and Bobrovsky. Yet if a backup has a poor stretch of games, it will completely kill all positive perception of their season. The idea that it's easier to play well for 25 games than for 60 is flawed, because it's easier to make up a lone bad stretch with a bigger sample.
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Except that it is not, because it is fundamentally much more difficult to play at high enough of a level over a long enough period of time to cement oneself as a bona fide starting goalie. If it were indeed easier, then every backup goalie who strings together a good spat of games would emerge as a NHL starter.