One of the easiest decisions the Minnesota Wild have made in each of the past couple of years has been the filing of their team’s nominee for the Bill Masterton Memorial Trophy. Wild goalie Josh Harding won the award last year and his name was submitted by Minnesota again this season thanks to the perseverance Harding has demonstrated in continuing his NHL career while battling multiple sclerosis.
But Harding isn’t the only puckstopper in Minnesota who’s shown the dedication to hockey that the Masterton honours. And while the circumstances and stakes are vastly different than what Harding is facing, Ilya Bryzgalov deserves some love for the focus he’s displayed during a season that’s run the gamut from an ECHL tryout to a potential first-round playoff showdown with one of his old teams, the Anaheim Ducks.
Though he’d already established himself as a top-tier NHL goalie during a four-year stop with the Phoenix Coyotes, Bryzgalov didn’t really enter the broader hockey consciousness until the HBO 24/7 series that preceded the 2012 Winter Classic. That was during Bryzgalov’s first season with the Philadelphia Flyers, after the team inked him to a nine-year, $51-million pact in the summer of 2011. Whether you saw Bryzgalov’s musings on our minute role in the vast universe as reflective or flaky, it quickly became apparent that the Flyers weren’t thrilled to have a creaseman so taken by the cosmos. At least, not as long as his save percentage was below .910.
Whether it was because—as Bryzgalov has claimed—the team tried to change his style or simply that the Russian’s lay-it-bare personality was bound to backfire on the big Philly stage, both sides were clearly ready for an expensive divorce last summer after just a two-season union. As such, the Flyers agreed to pay Bryzgalov $23 million over the next 14 years just to go away. In the span of three years, Bryzgalov had gone from runner-up for the Vezina Trophy to padded punchline.
With guaranteed money rolling in and a growing sense Bryzgalov just wasn’t capable of keeping the low profile most teams desire, many assumed that the goalie, at 33, would happily return home to inflate his fortune in the KHL. But Bryzgalov was determined to stick in the world’s best league. While the Florida Panthers invited him to their training camp, no contract offer was extended and Bryzgalov wound up on a tryout with the ECHL’s Las Vegas Wranglers to stay in shape. Reporters quickly dreamed of stories featuring the spaceman on the strip, but Bryzgalov wasn’t positioning himself to shoot a reality show pilot.
By early November, the Edmonton Oilers’ grave goalie situation necessitated a change and Bryzgalov was all business as he signed a one-year deal with the club. After a brief conditioning stint in the American Hockey League, Bryzgalov did what he could behind a shoddy defensive unit and, perhaps most importantly, did nothing distracting off the ice.
Then, with Harding sidelined and veteran Niklas Backstrom shelved for the season with a strained abdominal muscle, Wild GM Chuck Fletcher burned a fourth-round pick one day before the trade deadline to bring in Bryzgalov as much-needed insurance at the most important position.
It’s turning out to be one of the best transactions of the season.
All Bryzgalov has done with the Wild is post a 7-0-3 record with three shutouts and a .923 save percentage. On Tuesday, when Minnesota clinched the first wild card spot in the West with a shootout win over the Boston Bruins, there was Bryzgalov enjoying an emphatic stick pump after stopping the last B’s shooter.
Given where he was a few short months ago, Bryzgalov was certainly entitled to a little celebration. And increasingly, everything that happened in Philadelphia feels like it occurred in a galaxy far, far away.