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Jonathan Willis of Sportsnet.ca had an interesting breakdown on Marc-Andre Fleury and the Penguins backup goaltenders this past week. You can find that article here.


Here is an excerpt of what he found:


In summary, for seven best years of his career, Fleury has been backed-up by a goalie of some note for just one season, otherwise it’s been a career backup who played his way out of the league and a trio of AHL-calibre goalies. With the exception of Vokoun, it’s a group that any bona fide NHL No. 1 goaltender should trash in a head-to-head comparison. Except Fleury doesn’t. In fact, he actually comes in a little south of the group of five we’ve mentioned when we look at even-strength save percentage.


He found that the backups had an EVSV% of .922%

Marc-Andre Fleury checked in at .920%.

I was reading through some of the comments and responses to his blog at various places on the internet and there was some common criticism. One of the go to pieces of criticism was backup goalies usually get the easier matchups and they should have the better numbers. The implication here is that the team leaves Fleury out to dry when he is on the ice because of the tougher competition. On the surface this sounded to me like more unfounded excuse making for the Penguins franchise goaltender, so I decided to look into the numbers further.

If the Penguins played worse in front of Fleury it should show up in the Fenclose percentages throughout the past seven years (2007-14). Here is what I found:





Welp, guess we can throw that myth out the window.

The Penguins play better for Fleury than they do their backup goalies, yet the backups have better numbers.






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Chad Nolan of the Pens Initiative blog was kind enough to extend an invite to me for his Penguins roundtable. Also joining the roundtable were Pittsburgh Tribune Penguins beat writer Josh Yohe, former Hockeybuzz Penguins writer and current Penguins Live radio host Brian Metzer, and Penguins writer at Hockey's Future Ian Altenbaugh.

You can find that roundtable link here


Thanks for reading!


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