As resident Pens fan who watched Fleury in the playoffs for 10 years you...do not want this actually. This is the fourth time he's been benched in the postseason because he always, eventually, falls apart. 2018 run he looked unstoppable and then as usual, eventually the Caps got in his head, and he gave up 4 goals a game in the SCF.
2016 he started a single game for the Pens in the playoffs and gave up 4 goals on 9 shots.
2017 his last game as a Penguin, against the Sens, he gave up 3 goals in the first 10 minutes of the first period.
He always hits a wall. The only time he managed to not hit a wall was 2009, but his numbers since then are, generally, average at best. He was bolstered by playing behind an exceptional offense for most of his career.
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Originally Posted by Ashasx
If that's true, not a good look for Fleury as his team dominates their way to round 2.
Fleury pouted his way through the 2016 Cup win here, he openly criticized Sullivan for benching him in 2017. This is not new from him, it's just far more out in the open.
Media loves this guy, so they give him a pass on everything. He's an average goalie, at best, who played for some very very good teams. And if you want the breakdown on numbers, there's a fantastic blog post about it.
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Fleury has three Cup rings and an Olympic gold. But as the clock ticked down on those championships, Fleury was sitting on the bench for all but one. He faced 32 shots total in parts of 2 games of the 2016 playoffs. He faced zero in the 2010 Olympics. Even if we give him partial credit for the 2017 Cup (where he started until halfway through the Conference Final), his earned trophy case is half the size.
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In the regular season, he is compared to the top 31 starters in the league by TOI, and in the playoff it's the top 16. Looking over his entire career, a couple things become immediately clear.
Fleury was an above-average starter once in eight seasons as the starter in Pittsburgh. This is accounting for Pittsburgh's team defence - which as mentioned above was never worse than 14th in the league and frequently top-10 when Fleury was the starter.
Fleury was the 22nd best starter or worse in five of his eleven seasons as a starter. Not only was Fleury often not elite, he was abjectly bad in almost half of the seasons he was a starting goaltender.
From 2009 until 2013, he was consistently one of the worst playoff goalies in the league. This included four consecutive bottom-4 performances.
Fleury had one top-5 regular season (2017-18) and three top-5 playoff runs. Two of those, to his credit, were trips to the Cup final while one was a 5-game loss in the first round.
I hate it when Vegas wins a round. Their fans have had it way too easy.
So go Canucks.
I get the hate towards Vegas, and I agree their fans are spoiled and were gifted a Cup contender right out of the gate without having to suffer like the rest of us.
At the same time though, I'd be perfectly happy if the Canucks never win a Cup in my lifetime. It's not so much the team, it's their obnoxious, idiotic riot-happy fans. I live in Vancouver and my Canucklehead friends are already unbearable. Imagine if they made it to the finals? Ugh, no thanks.
So Go Knights.
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I actually dislike Vegas more than the Canucks right now. Stupid expansion team gifted into a solid yearly contender. **** Vegas! That said Vegas in 6.
Fleury has been an inconsistent performer throughout his career. He has good seasons and he has bad seasons. This is one of his bad seasons, so it's perfectly understandable why he'd be on the bench.
As far as his reputation goes, he got a lot of undeserved credit when the Penguins won their cup in 2009 - he was not good during that run. Then he proceeded to be absolute trash in the playoffs for the next five years or so. That caused such a backlash against his reputation as a good goalie that he actually swung all the way to "underrated" - generally giving solid netminding and never being injured meant he was actually pretty decent value for the money he got. Then that whole "does Fleury actually suck" debate faded into the past and people just sort of stopped treating him as a guy worth talking about, as he proceeded to alternate good seasons of .920+ goaltending with bad seasons. At this point I don't even know what he's rated, so I have a hard time considering him overrated.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
Fleury is a hero in Vegas. Don't know if Gallant would have benched him, with the history, but DeBoer doesn't have that history, and there is no doubt that Lehner has been better in both the regular season and the playoffs. Vegas got him because Fleury was having a bad season.
For him to allow his agent to post something like that is terrible. But with his cap hit, he's probably not going anywhere, while Lehner is undoubtedly trying to get a multi-year deal.
I actually dislike Vegas more than the Canucks right now. Stupid expansion team gifted into a solid yearly contender. **** Vegas! That said Vegas in 6.
They messed up the expansion format big time.
Made it way too easy to come into a wealth of good players top to bottom. Expansion teams should not be able to contend with the first batch of players they collect.
Maybe you add one to the forwards and defenders you can protect? All I know is Seattle doing the same thing would be pretty ridiculous. At that point you'd be cheering for your franchise to fold or move so you can get the expansion team treatment.
Teams work for years and decades to assemble what the knights have in no time. I suppose good on their GM and management for taking full advantage, but their team will find very little love outside of the bandwagon fans they picked up.
Last edited by djsFlames; 08-23-2020 at 12:42 AM.
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Made it way too easy to come into a wealth of good players top to bottom. Expansion teams should not be able to contend with the first batch of players they collect.
Literally no one thought they were going to make the playoffs, let alone contend, with the players they selected at the expansion draft. If anyone says they did expect it, they are liars.
Even Vegas didn't. The strategy was to put themselves in a position to collect draft picks - hence the number of defensemen selected - and they accomplished that. The only reasons they ended up being good were, first of all, pro scouting (they acquired players that other teams had undervalued and had put in more limited roles) and GMs panicking about losing players and giving up too much to ensure that they could avoid what they thought was a worst case scenario. It wasn't a badly designed process, it was a masterful performance by McPhee and his staff.
This won't happen the same way again. The Seattle draft will no doubt produce a better team than what the old expansion drafts were like (they won't be the 1992 ducks or anything) but the rest of the league has learned its lesson and I suspect there will be much less wheeling and dealing with Francis about who he's selecting. In basically every case you were better off just losing the extra guy you couldn't protect.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
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Literally no one thought they were going to make the playoffs, let alone contend, with the players they selected at the expansion draft. If anyone says they did expect it, they are liars.
Even Vegas didn't. The strategy was to put themselves in a position to collect draft picks - hence the number of defensemen selected - and they accomplished that. The only reasons they ended up being good were, first of all, pro scouting (they acquired players that other teams had undervalued and had put in more limited roles) and GMs panicking about losing players and giving up too much to ensure that they could avoid what they thought was a worst case scenario. It wasn't a badly designed process, it was a masterful performance by McPhee and his staff.
This won't happen the same way again. The Seattle draft will no doubt produce a better team than what the old expansion drafts were like (they won't be the 1992 ducks or anything) but the rest of the league has learned its lesson and I suspect there will be much less wheeling and dealing with Francis about who he's selecting. In basically every case you were better off just losing the extra guy you couldn't protect.
Agreed. The league also didnt want a ####ty franchise for a decade either. But to say they were gifted a great team is false. They picked up players that were third liners or 4th d man and got a few gifts from the likes of Florida that had bad cap management. I don't normally agree with corsi but he is absolutely right every one thought this was a ####ty team and on top of that everyone thought they even screwed up the draft. I do not see how people can hate them for success, think, they took derek Engelland from us great guy but not a world beater, not a gift by any means
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Maybe Fleury should run for office - listen to the mealy-mouthed way he dodges questions about his involvement with that photo being sent out. Straight out of question period.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
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