Lost amidst the other, far more immediately relevant deals this past deadline day was a fairly innocuous swap between the Calgary Flames and the Columbus Blue Jackets: Calgary moved Kevin Lalande for a 4th round draft pick. At the time, I was surprised the Flames managed to get anything as high as a 4th rounder for what was a at the time an ECHL goalie who had been previously drafted in the 5th round. Seemed like a steal, even when the return was so modest.
The Blue Jackets installed Lalande as their AHL starter (since their previous starter and back-up were up in the NHL at the time) and he promptly won 3 straight games and was named AHL player of the week. Since then, I've kept a closer eye on the former Flames property and am starting to come to the shakey conclusion that Calgary may have traded away their best goaltending prospect.
First, some background. Lalande spent 3 seasons in the OHL with the Bellville Bulls. His SV% over those three years was consistently good to excellent: .920, .916 and .919. He finished 4th, 3rd, and 3rd in the OHL in terms of SV% in each of those years respectively. In 04/05, his rookie season, his .920 SV% was the best of any freshman puck stopper in the league. He was named to the all-star team in 05/06.
His first few games as a pro didn't go so well for Kevin and may be the reason he was relegated to a third stringer by the organization. In 7 games for Quad Cities, he won just twice and stopped just 88.8% of the pucks he saw. That was last year, most of which he spent in the ECHL with the Las Vegas Wranglers, where he put up far more respectable numbers over a longer period (.932 SV% in 27 games played). Since then, Lalande has managed sparkling percentages where ever he's played: ECHL (.925 SV%), Quad Cities (.929 SV%) and Syracuse (.927 SV%).
What's significant is, as far as I can tell, neither the QC Flames nor SYR Crunch were good teams this season. The former placed 5th in the West Division and had a GD of -4. The latter were 5th in the North Division and actually worse defensively, allowing 10 more goals against than the Flames and had a nominally worse GD (-12). So it's not like he was playing behind juggernauts that were limiting the opposition to perimeter shots and winning each game by 4.
In addition, Lalande outperformed all his peers this season. No other Flames 'tender posted an equal or better SV% than Lalande. Ditto Syracuse, aside from Calder shoe-in Steve Mason who played a mere 3 games in the minors before being called up to save the Blue Jackets season.
Now, to some degree, I'm reading tea leaves here: Lalande hasn't even seen 1000 shots at the AHL at this point in his career, so we're talking small sample, potential for misleading results, yadda yadda yadda. Still, looking at Lalande's results both past and present shows a lot of arrows pointing in the right direction. And while Im not big on the value of goalie prospects in the first place, I find it's generally a good rule to try to keep the best ones around. Of course, maybe he's just a really, really good Junior/ECHL/AHL goalie and little else. Something to keep an eye on, anyways.
