Heading into the first round here, there's going to be a couple of pretty good teams relying on some pretty bad goaltending to get them through the post season. The three that leap to mind are Calgary (Kipper, .903 SV%), Washington (Theodore, .900 SV%) and Detroit (Osgood, .887 SV%). They were 32nd, 40th and 45th in terms of league ranking by SV% respectively during the regular season.
In the Flames case, they have no choice. In 6 appearances this year back-up Curtis McElhinney didn't fair any better than Kiprusoff. As much as I think the kid got the shaft this season and is potentially better than his results, there aren't any arrows to indicate he could outperform the incumbent.
That isn't really true in the other two cases however. Watching Theodore lose the game for the Capitals last night really brought this home for me - the guy probably isn't even playing at replacement level for that club. Here's his stats line via Hockey Numbers:
Theordore - 2.87 GAA, .900 SV%, .897 SQN% (shot quality neutral save percentage), 28.7 SA/60
Now, here are his back-ups numbers:
Brent Johnson - 2.81 GAA, .908 SV%, .902 SQN%, 30.7 SA/60
Simeon Varlamov - 2.37 GAA, .918 SV%, .917 SQN%, 29 SA/60
Mikael Neuvirth - 3.00 GAA, .892 SV%, .871 SQN%, 27.8 SA/60
Varlamov and Neuvirth are rookies (which were discussed briefly here). They only played 9 games combined, so there's sample issues here. Johnson's number are marginally better than Theodore's results and he played in 19 games this season before being felled by injury.
Still, the only guy Theodore outperformed this season was Neuvirth (whose numbers have fallen steadily since his draft season. I don't think he's the prospect the Caps hoped he'd be). Despite being the "more experienced" - and far more expensive goaltender - there's lots of reasons to think that Theodore is actually the wrong choice to go with here. However, given their investment in him (4.5M through next season) and the general animus towards rookies in the post-season, I'm guessing it's "Jose or bust!" for the Caps. It may prove to be very costly, since I think the Capitals could be major contenders for the cup with merely competent netminding.
The Osgood thing is even less defensible. He's been worse than Theodore on arguably a better team and Detroit has an older, experienced and proven alternative in Conklin. "He's done it before" is the rationale I keep hearing on choosing Osgood as the starter for the play-offs, but Im guessing that will go out the window pretty quickly if he starts (rather, continues) to suck. The same issue cropped up during Hasek's last stint in Motown and the club did the right thing (ran with the better goaltender at the time) in the end.
Course one of these guys might get hot, rendering all this moot. The hockey gods routinely give the touch one or two guys every post season and it's often impossible to predict who it'll be. Personally I hope it Kipper but I'm not going to hold my breath...
