There was a lot of regular comment on CP about how Flames were "riding a hot goalie to overachieve", but I look at it somewhat differently. I think that the team discovered that they could rely on the hot goalie and "discovered belief and discipline" to play the way they needed to.
I'm not a stats guy but in looking briefly at the goalie stats it seems to me that, compared to other regular NHL goalies, Wolfie is middle of the pack...11th in wins, something similar in Save %. I think that was entirely unexpected by Conroy & Huska and actually caught them a bit off-guard. There wasn't really an ability to do more during this season...but there is for 25-26.
I suspect that they will use some of their cap space and picks to upgrade, hoping that with steady netminding they can reproduce and increase the results from 24-25.
How they'll get there I'll leave to folks smarter than me, but that's my impression, FWIW.
Bright spots were the emergence of a few players given time and space due to injury or opportunity: Klapka being top of the heap, surprisingly Hanley as a journeyman, Vladar standing tall when needed later on in the season, and Kadri as an outright stud with some of the most amazing goals scored. Fun season and I never would cheer for losses, notwithstanding some of the moaning and groaning in the first 200+ posts in this thread. (I almost added Monahammer to my ignore list, but there were too many people quoting him; PW is already there and is still annoying to read in quotes.)
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Hey...where'd my avatar go?
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