BY PETER HOUSTON – FAN FUEL BLOGGER
One has a career .925 even strength save percentage (with a bad team in front of him), 104 games of NHL experience and just lead a team that had missed the playoffs for eight straight years to the postseason. One has a career .917 even strength save percentage (with a good team in front of him), has 62 games of NHL experience and has only ever served as a backup (albeit behind a pretty good net minder). Which one would you want to be your starting goalie?
The first goalie is James Reimer, the man who has done nothing but play well in his time with the Leafs, and the other is Jonathan Bernier, the man who was acquired to potentially take Reimer’s job.
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That the Leafs gave up some decent assets to acquire a goalie who is fairly worse statistically (caveat: small sample size) than their incumbent goalie is a bit of a mystery, but so are most things Dave Nonis has done as general manager of the Leafs. Although, there are some who would argue that there’s actually not much of a difference statistically. If you look at Reimer and Bernier’s traditional numbers like total save percentage and goals against average, Reimer has put up a career line of.916/2.71 while Bernier’s numbers are .912/2.36.
But a much more telling stat for goalies is even strength save percentage. Goalies that play on teams with really bad penalty kills (Reimer for most of his career) will have much lower overall save percentage numbers through minimal fault of their own. Now, with a bad penalty kill/bad goalie situation there is a bit of a chicken and the egg scenario.
Is the penalty kill bad because they have a bad goalie or is the goalie bad because he has a bad penalty kill? Luckily Pension Plan Puppets crunched the numbers and found that a team’s penalty kill affects how well goalies perform shorthanded much more than a goalie’s talent. That is to say, for the most part, a good goalie can’t make a bad penalty kill a good one, but a bad penalty kill can make a good goalie a bad one (while shorthanded) and vice versa.
So when comparing Reimer and Bernier, or any goalies for that matter, even strength save percentage is more useful. The only issue is that it decreases the sample size. The one thing Bernier has going for him is that 62 games is much too small a sample size to make conclusive judgments. But with that said, why would a team give up assets and cap space for a guy whose label is “too early to tell, but so far not so good and not as good as the guy we have?” Well, probably because it’s death, taxes and Leafs’ poor management decisions.