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Hotstove: Best Goaltending Tandem In The NHL? |
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Follow me on Twitter @ToddCordell
Todd Cordell
I'm going to go against the grain a little bit and go with the Philadelphia Flyers' tandem of Steve Mason and Michal Neuvirth.
Mason still doesn't get recognized as one of the league's better goaltenders because of how things ended in Columbus but he's been fantastic as a Flyer. Over the last two seasons he has been especially good as he ranks 1st among 24 goaltenders (minimum 4,000 minutes) in 5 v 5 save percentage.
Meanwhile Neuvirth ranks in a tie for 18th (with Jonathan Quick) among 46 goaltenders to play at least 2,000 5 v 5 minutes over the last couple seasons. Some of the notable goaltenders Neuvirth has out performed at full-strength include Ben Bishop, Frederik Andersen, Jake Allen, Martin Jones and Sergei Bobrovsky to name but a few.
Adam French
Henrik Lundqvist and Antti Raanta.
Lundqvist is in my mind still the best goaltender in the world. A pillar of consistency and constantly somebody I expect to be elite and never fails. He has been consistently (important) a top goalie for pretty much a decade without missing a beat. He will again play his 60+ games of elite level Lundqvistian glory.
Raanta is a good backup. An above average one in my opinion. He did really well last year and he did alright with the Hawks. One way to look at this question is who has the best 1A/1B tandem which would likely be either Bishop/Vasilevski, Fleury/Murray or Mason/Neuvirth if we're basing it on last year. However I look at it as which elite goalie has the good enough backup that can be his support and not his successor. This to me is Raanta. I would never trust him with my teams future, but 20 games...sure. He's a fine alternative.
Peter Tessier
At first blush I want to say Chicago with Crawford and Darling but is that accurate? Griess and Halak are also a comparable tandem too. One of the challenges with this task is predicting who will be the best with all the movement from the summer. The tandems of last year are apart where one might rank Anaheim highly thus it's a prediction/guess as much as anything else.
One tandem that intrigues me is that of Allen and Hutton in St. Louis. They could be my dark horse pair to surprise but again, this is the goalie position so there's a lot of voodoo going on here too. Perhaps the Holtby Grubauer tandem comes up big or maybe Mason and Nuevirth?
Again voodoo and wild a$$ guessing comes into play but I'll go with my initial though in Crawford-Darling but only until a new pair displaces them which is likely to happen.
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