Pittsburgh Penguins head coach Mike Sullivan has faced plenty of tough decisions during his time as a bench boss, but perhaps none as difficult as the one he faced prior to Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Final against the Ottawa Senators.
Up until that point, Marc-Andre Fleury had backstopped the team through two and a half rounds after regular-season starter Matt Murray went down during warmups of Game 1 of the post-season. (We learned on Thursday that he suffered a torn hamstring.)
The veteran netminder posted a .924 save percentage through 15 games, but was pulled after the first period of Game 3 against the Senators and replaced by a newly-healthy Murray, who took back the No. 1 role and ran with it to the tune of a .937 save percentage, 1.70 goals-against average and three shutouts in 11 games to get the Penguins to their second straight Stanley Cup—and his second as a rookie.
Sullivan joined Sportsnet’s Hockey Central at Noon Thursday to share his thoughts on the debate and the decision to go with Murray at that time.
“What I can tell you is it was probably the most difficult coaching decision that I’ve ever had to make,” Sullivan said. “I think, first of all, most coaches don’t have that type of decision because they don’t have two No. 1 Stanley Cup-winning goaltenders at their disposal like we do.”
“It was a very, very difficult decision that the coaching staff had to make,” said Sullivan. “These guys are both high-quality goaltenders, they’re such great people.”
Fleury was the starter back in 2009 when the Penguins won the Cup, and the team rode the hot streak of Murray last post-season.
Just as the hockey world shared plenty of opinions during The Great Goalie Debate of 2017, Sullivan said there were numerous discussions behind closed doors before settling on Murray.
“Without going into the details, there was a lot of deliberation behind the scenes with our coaching staff as far as what was the right decision at the time and we felt as though that was the right decision and that was the direction that we went,” he said.
“Certainly both of these guys, we feel, give us an opportunity to win games regardless of which guy’s in the net and I’m not sure we would’ve won the Stanley Cup this year if we didn’t have both of those guys in the net helping us win,” Sullivan explained.
While we’ll never know what the outcome would’ve been had Sullivan turned back to Fleury for Game 4, we do have a sense of what the future might hold for Fleury—and all signs are pointing to him not being in Pittsburgh for much longer.
We learned on Monday that the longtime Penguins goalie agreed to waive his no-move clause back in February, but only for Vegas—a decision Fleury talked to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about on Wednesday.
“The team came forward to me and asked…it gave them more (flexibility) for the future, for the summer, so they weren’t scrambling to trade me,” Fleury said of the decision, which allows the Penguins to protect Murray from being selected by the Vegas Golden Knights during the upcoming expansion draft. “I thought it was the right thing to help the team, to stay with the team and finish the season here and have a chance to play for the Cup again.”
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