About 14 hours ago, Mike Condon let in this goal:
When things are going your way ... they’re really going your way. pic.twitter.com/n0SOIANBky
— Arizona Coyotes (@ArizonaCoyotes) October 31, 2018
Then at noon today, Condon was placed on waivers:
There is expectation today that OTT will put G Michael Condon on waivers. Rough night last night, I would assume they send him to AHL to regain confidence if not claimed.
— Elliotte Friedman (@FriedgeHNIC) October 31, 2018
As Friedman notes, this is probably a move to get him more confidence. I'm sure Dorion would be over the moon if a team claimed him and his two-year contract (worth $4.8M), but there's essentially no chance of that happening considering how poorly he has played for over a year. This waive looks to be different than the Zack Smith one simply because of the timing of it. Condon is coming off of a dreadful start, and I think they just want to get him in the right frame of mind.
Hopefully he can play well for 5-10 games in Belleville and then come back up again and be at least serviceable. At the same time though, I don't expect him to be even an average backup goaltender. He has had one successful season in the NHL, but even then he was only league average with a .914 SV%. If he could put up those kinds of results, then he would be a very valuable backup, but the thing is that every other season he has been one of the league's worst.
His sample size this season is incredibly tiny with only two games played, but he looks even worse than last season when he had a .902 SV%. And in an even larger sample of 55 games with Montreal, he had a .903 SV%. So Condon is not somebody who I'm expecting to bounce back and be like a Philipp Grubauer or Aaron Dell or even Michal Neuvirth.
I would assume that the Senators will be calling up veteran Mike McKenna to play for a few games, as Filip Gustavsson is still very fresh in the AHL and Marcus Hogberg is still injured. McKenna obviously isn't a long-term answer for the backup spot, but he will cover for Condon as he resets his game. The only thing that is unfortunate about this situation is that Condon will probably be getting as many games as possible, so that will be taking starts away from Gustavsson in the meantime. Then again, he might not be in the AHL for very long if he has a few very good outings.
Waiving Condon is probably the right move for the Senators, but it's another one of those moves that could have and should have easily been avoided. There were plenty of other backup goalies available in the summer of 2017, and for some reason Dorion decided to give term to a backup who played well for a stretch but severely faltered the more games he played. It's never a good idea to give more than two years to players at the bottom of the lineup because they are the most easy to replace and there is no need to lock them up for so long.
The contract was bad the second it was signed, mainly because there was such a small chance of it being close to fair value for the Senators. It was almost always going to be a steal for Condon because he simply was not going to be worth the money. Good for him and his agent though, they did a great job.
I genuinely do feel bad for the guy because he seems like one of the funnier players on the team, and I don't take pleasure in any player's misery. At the same time, I have to call out bad performances when I see them, and so does Pierre Dorion.