When you’re trying to pinpoint who the MVP of the Vegas Golden Knights has been, there are a few contenders. How about leading scorer Alex Tuch, who has been the healthiest member of the second line with 50 games played, over which time he’s scored 40 points? If not him, what about No. 1 defenceman Nate Schmidt, who missed the first 20 games of the season to suspension, but has averaged a team-high 22:10 per game since returning. Plus, Vegas was 8-11-1 without him and has been 23-12-3 since he returned.
Or, maybe it’s more straightforward than that and Marc-Andre Fleury is the clearcut winner here. After all, he’s faced the third-most shots in the league to this point and has been counted on for the heaviest workload, starting 50 of Vegas’ 58 games.
So far that formula has worked. But with just 24 games left in the season, the Golden Knights may be wise to rest their 34-year-old netminder a little more often. To date, six of the eight games he didn’t start came on one side of a back-to-back, with the only exceptions being an Oct. 30 game in Nashville and a Jan. 6 game at home versus New Jersey. From now through the end of the regular season, Vegas has four more back-to-back situations on the schedule and if those are the only rest scenarios for Fleury, he’d be on track to finish the season with a career-high 68 starts.
“We all understand numbers and you don’t want to play him 65 or 70 games, there’s no doubt we don’t want to do that,” Golden Knights head coach Gerard Gallant told Hockey Central at Noon on Wednesday. “But we’re in the winning business and he gets days off between games like today and a lot of these days he’ll take off and he’ll get his rest. I’m hoping to use Malcolm Subban more in the second half — he’s gotta take the ball here and get ready to go and play some big games for us because we got (24) games left…and we’re going to need two goalies for sure.”
Part of the reason they’ve had to lean on Fleury so much is that Subban has been injured for a stretch of the season and third-stringer Maxime Lagace, who posted an .867 save percentage in 16 appearances last season, wasn’t as reliable in his place. And another is that after a slow start, Vegas has been scratching and clawing in a tough top of the Pacific Division as they try and wiggle their way into home-ice advantage for the first round at least. With a 16-8-3 record at T-Mobile, the ‘Vegas Flu’ advantage has been very real across two seasons now.
Sitting nine points clear of ninth place in the Western Conference, though, the playoffs are all but a lock at this point, and it would seem prudent to start planning for the spring. Subban isn’t Lagace, and while his 2-5-0 record isn’t ideal, Subban’s .904 save percentage isn’t bad for a backup. Subban won’t play most of the rest of the games, and barring injury it’s unlikely Fleury will finish the season with fewer than 60 starts, but it would seem important to rest him more often than usual.
There’s no doubt Fleury has been a horse this season, but even though he leads the league in wins and shutouts, his case for the Vezina becomes a little more difficult upon further review. Consider these numbers and how Fleury’s save rates compare to a goalie who’s played fewer games, but faces far more shots:
| PLAYER | HDSA | HDSV% | MDSA | MDSV% | dSV% | GP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| M-A Fleury | 205 | 0.771 | 389 | 0.91 | -0.62 | 50 |
| Jacob Markstrom | 210 | 0.8 | 362 | 0.912 | 0.37 | 43 |
But his play isn’t what’s concerning — it’s the workload.
Only two of the 13 Cup-winning goalies of the salary cap era have started more than 60 games in the season they won it all, so maybe this is where and why red flags should start to rise when projecting another post-season run for Vegas.
It is worth noting that Fleury himself is one of those two goalies who won a Stanley Cup in a season he started more than 60 games, but he was just 24 years old at the time and in his fourth full NHL season. The other was 26-year-old Jonathan Quick, who started 69 games in his fourth full NHL season as well. Neither goalie had worn down the tread on their tires.
Focusing just on Fleury, his overall playoff numbers are far better in seasons when he was counted on a little less. Heck, just last season, mostly due to injury, Fleury only made 46 starts and went on to have the best playoffs of his career until the Stanley Cup Final when he didn’t allow less than three goals in any game. [sidebar]
Fleury has played 64 or more games in a regular season six times and in those years he got past the first round just twice with a cumulative save percentage of .894. On the other side, Fleury has played less than 60 games in a season five times, with a cumulative playoff save percentage of .924.
Even historically it’d be a stretch to expect Fleury to carry his team on a massive run. Since the expansion era began in 1967 there have only been two goalies who were at least 34 years of age and who played at least 60 games in a season that went on to win the Stanley Cup that year: a 37-year-old Dominik Hasek with the Red Wings in 2002 and a 35-year-old Patrick Roy with Colorado in 2001. They played 65 and 62 regular season games, respectively.
Getting more recent, since the cap era began in 2005-06 a total of 19 goalies aged 33 years or older played 60 or more games in a season. Six of them made the playoffs and on only three occasions did they even get past the first round. In 2010 Evgeni Nabokov took the San Jose Sharks to the Western Conference Final where they were swept by Chicago. And Pekka Rinne did it twice, losing in seven games in Round 2 of the 2016 Stanley Cup Playoffs and losing in the Cup Final in 2017 when he played 61 regular season games.
It’s not impossible, but it would certainly buck a long-running trend if Fleury — who has 35 playoff appearances over just the past two seasons — played 65-plus regular season games and then led Vegas on a deep playoff run.
There are other things that need to come together for Vegas to reach another Stanley Cup Final — their top line needs to find some of the offence it lost from a season ago and the second line has to remain healthy — but perhaps the most important requirement is stable play from Fleury.
As Gallant said, Fleury does get rest on days off between games, but is it enough? Historically speaking, it seems the way Vegas can give itself the best odds of another post-season run is to give Fleury more frequent rest on game days down the stretch.
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