Ride or die.
That seems to be the Pittsburgh Penguins philosophy as it relates to their goalie-for-life Marc-Andre Fleury.
From a distance – a considerable distance – the decision to sign the man they call The Flower to a four-year, $23-million contract extension seems obvious enough.
He was drafted first overall in 2003. He led the franchise to their most recent high point, stopping 48 of 50 shots in Game 7 of the 2009 Stanley Cup finals against the Detroit Red Wings, securing the Penguins their only championship of the Sidney Crosby era. His last-second save on Red Wings great Nicklas Lidstrom is part of franchise lore.
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And this year Fleury, still just 30 years old, is playing like one of the best goaltenders in hockey.
He leads the NHL in shutouts, with three. He’s 7-2-0, his .931 save percentage is 10 points higher than his career best and is third-best among goalies who have played at least 500 minutes so far this young NHL season.
But seriously?
Fleury is in the final year of a seven-year, $35-million contract which seemed like a reasonable deal when he was 23 years old and coming off a Stanley Cup final appearance, but it quickly became a cap hit anvil after he began stringing together several barely average regular season performances and some out-and-out playoff flops.
The best thing about Fleury’s deal was that it was ending after this season, and the idea that Crosby and Evgeni Malkin wouldn’t spend their entire primes trying to figure out different ways to say “our goalie sucked” seemed refreshing.
When I met with him in August Fleury didn’t think he’d be extended and seemed weary of being viewed widely as the biggest obstacle between Crosby and the Stanley Cup.
“When you first came in and our team sucked for a few years, but then we got good and made it to the finals and then won the Cup and everything seemed great and easy,” he said when asked about the crazy highs and lows of being a goalie in the NHL and on one of the league’s signature franchises. “And even though we had some great seasons after that everyone wanted to trade everybody – everyone wanted to trade me – because we weren’t winning year after year after year.”
Well, no one really was arguing that the Pens should trade Crosby. But Fleury, far from being a goalie you could depend on when the stakes were at their highest, was emerging as a first-class choker.
The best thing you could say about Fleury for most of his career as the Penguins starter is that he was just OK. From when the Penguins first made it back to the playoffs in 2006-07 until last season, Fleury’s aggregate save percentage was .913 compared to a league average of .909. Moreover during five of those eight seasons a rotating cast of Fleury’s back-ups posted higher save percentages than the putative No.1.
But a team with the firepower of the Penguins – on average the fifth highest scoring team in the NHL over the past eight years – the real pressure comes in the playoffs, and in the playoffs Fleury has been awful.
His best performance came in 2007-08 when he ran up a gaudy .933 save percentage in a 20-game run that ended in a six-game series against the Detroit Red Wings. That’s the run that got him his first big contract.
But take away that one great year and Fleury’s playoff save percentage was just .890 before a respectable 13-game run last spring.
Most memorable – for all the wrong reasons – was Fleury’s meltdown against the Philadelphia Flyers when the Penguins managed to put 21 goals past Ilya Bryzgalov but were bounced in six games when Fleury allowed 26.
The Penguins were so worried about their franchise goaltender that they enlisted a new goalie coach, Mike Bales, for the 2013-14 season and also insisted that Fleury begin seeing a sports psychologist.
Bales focused on helping Fleury adopt a more minimalist approach in the net, curbing his natural aggressiveness. The psychologist?
“The key is to help you know what to think about before the game and at certain moments during the game to stay relaxed, stay at ease,” Fleury said. “I think its been good.”
The returns were promising, as Fleury responded last season with a .914 save percentage and more importantly a reasonable playoff showing with a .915 save percentage.
Couple that with his hot start this year and the Penguins and new general manager Jim Rutherford seem to think he’s turned a corner.
“He’s earned a good contract, which he just got,” Rutherford told Prime Time Sports Wednesday. “He played pretty well in the playoffs last year. I’m not concerned about the past, he’s made some adjustments to his preparation; he has a good working relationship with Mike Bales, our goalie coach, and he won in ’09. He’s a goalie that has already won, he’s good enough to win again and he will.”
That might be a charitable interpretation of eight years of recent history that features more playoff failures than successes and more stretches of average play than anything surpassing that.
But the only thing worse than having an average goalie is not having one.
Ultimately that seems to be the calculation that Rutherford has made. While it appears that Fleury’s salary has gone up — from $5 million to $5.75 million — in reality he got a bit of pay cut given that when he got his first big contract the salary cap was $56.7-million and next season, when his extension kicks in, it’s projected to be nearly $70 million and going up from there.
The best thing anyone can say about Marc-Andre Fleury is that he simply isn’t as big a part of the Penguins as he used to be.