To me, I am not concerned about Rittich.
I don’t see a ton of room for improvement over last year. But he has good fundamentals. I really like his game.
Yes he had an injury mid season after which his stats took a step down. But segmenting early and late year stats means you include the 6 goal TB drubbing and the Toronto 6 goal game shortly thereafter. Two of these in close proximity have a material impact on the stats across a much larger sample. Frankly, I can see a few games like that here and there this coming year, and will try not to get too hung up on the overall stats of the segment with a bad game in a statistical sense.
As for Talbot, sure, he has something to prove, but last year was an outlier for him, and a much smaller sample size. I have seen a lot of ‘this guy scored’ pictures in my day. I didn’t watch enough Talbot goals last year to segregate the majority of goals between team and goalie, but do know Smith let in a lot of stoppable shots the first half of the year. The Flames won a lot of games in spite of Smith who was tracking for a lot if the year as the worst starting goalie.
I’m happy to give Talbot the benefit of the doubt and am not concerned at this point
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