Quote:
Originally Posted by 1qqaaz
Tim Thomas played 82 games overall in 2010-2011. He was 36. Quick played 89 games in 2011-2012. Both Thomas and Quick had amazing stats and won cups.
I'm not too worried about resting Rittich. In fact, I think that's pretty ridiculous.
Rittich is 26, not 62.
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Those are also the only two 'elite' level goalies to have won cups in the last 15 years...
The rest of the winners were good to very good to very very good (Fleury, Holtby, Giguere, Khabi). In most cases, these guys have started 65+ in other seasons, yet their teams didn't achieve the same levels in those years. Of course you can't definitively say it's causation and not just coincidental correlation, but the evidence is growing that it's the former.
So the whole point of my post is that isn't worth investing your teams assets and/or cap space too heavily on a #1 goalie...which tends to result in a cheaper, less capable backup, which forces you to ride your #1 guy too hard (also essentially puts your teams fortunes into one egg basket, where a bad year or injury de-rails everything).
So in answer to the thread question, Rittich is at least 50% of the answer. It's possible he's a good enough goalie to warrant 70 starts a year. But there is zero benefit to moving in that direction, both for performance and contract reasons. The team should continue to try to answer the other 50% of the equation, but without spending (m)any assets to do so.
