Quote:
Originally Posted by New Era
There are goaltenders for teams that play certain styles. Mike Smith is a middling goaltender in a defense first system. In a system that gives up homeplate situations, he's horrible. Unless this team, one that was built to play a certain way, changes up that system completely, Smith will never be successful. The Flames need a goaltender who can make the big save, and Smith isn't that guy. The downward facing snow angel is not a good strategy to stopping shots in close.
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Two problems there though.
1) There are only 5-10 goalies in the world that are good holding net in a tire fire, and they're not getting one of those. So they need to clean up the tire fire before they worry about the goaltender.
2) The numbers don't suggest Smith is terrible in those chances. Last year he was 13th in high danger (when you look at the top 32 most played goaltenders) he was 1st in medium danger and he was 31st in low danger (hurt greatly by his finish).
If anything he was good when things broke down but let up too many iffy ones.
This year 21st in high danger, 27th in medium danger, 16th in low danger and off to a poor start.
The Flames when Smith is net have the 8th worst expected save percentage at .904, that's terrible. They're giving up too much. The season started with Smith having a -8.8 differential to the expected save percentage (after the two Vancouver games) which meant he was even worse than the team itself. Since then that number is tightening, now sitting -1.9. So he's improving, the team really isn't in what they give up.
This is important because he was always brought in to be a 15th ranked guy. He needs to get back there. But he can't if his team is ranked 23rd or 28th in key defensive stats. All he can do his push is expected back to 0 and he's done the job he was brought in to do.
They're not getting a top 5 goaltender.