Mailbag: Any more moves and how players/coaches deal with bad goaltending (Tristan Jarry)

Tristan Jarry

Mailbag: Any more moves and how players/coaches deal with bad goaltending

By Ryan Wilson

Aug 9, 2021 • 1:04 pm

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I’m on multiple vacations so thanks to those who submitted questions to make things easy on me. Here we go.

The million dollar question. I would love this to be true, but with the team capped out, Hextall hesitant to use futures, and a lot of the player movement around the league already over I think I’m leaning false. If this does turn out to be false people who follow the Flyers will be on solid footing to say we told you so. Things like this aren’t overly encouraging especially since the Penguins big offseason thing to do was improve the goaltending

Perhaps the Penguins will find a team willing to take Marcus Pettersson for the forward equivalent. The Marc-Andre Fleury thing has fizzled out. I’m not sure I even know what a “biggest move of the offseason… looks like for this team right now.

I’m going to break it up into the player perspective and the coaching perspective.

As a player you are really pissed and it would be difficult not to blame someone for such a bad performance in such a pivotal position on the ice. It’s human nature. It feels like no matter what you do it isn’t enough on the ice and it can be incredibly taxing from a mental standpoint. It does bleed into your play because now the expectation of perfection bleeds into all of your split-second decisions because a negative result is around every corner. It sucks. Now, there is a difference between feeling all of those valid feelings and expressing them to the goaltender struggling. In my personal experiences as a whole the team has been supportive the few times this has happened. We saw that happen with the Penguins players and management. I would add there’s a huge difference between a high school/college situation and a professional one, though. You can’t trade players at the amateur level. Professionally, you expect the front office to make the proper adjustments. As a player it doesn't matter. You're human and it is impossible to hand wave away goaltending like that whether it is an internal dialogue, something you share with teammates on the side, or if you let loose on the player themself.

Speaking personally as a coach, you feel powerless and like your choices are letting the team down. If you are sticking with a goalie performing like Jarry did you feel like you have no other option. I’m sure Mike Sullivan felt the same when running Jarry out there like he did. I had a few years where the goaltenders were performing similarly and not in a good way. Neither tender would take the wheel and go with it. I always felt horrible when the guy you went with had a bad game, but at the same time you went with that one because the other one wasn't doing anything to get the nod. Complicating the issue was one of the goalies was very likable and the other one was the opposite. You have to be careful managing the situation because when the unlikable goalie puts up a stinker it rubs the locker room the wrong way a lot more.

I had an unsolvable goaltender situation about a decade ago. I had probably the best roster I’d ever had. I truly believe we were championship caliber. We literally did not have a goalie. I don’t know why, but when our four-year starter graduated there was a year gap until the next guy was ready. There was another goalie, but let’s just say he had some disciplinary issues, and we were told in no uncertain terms by the superintendent he was not playing hockey. We had to use a defenseman we cut as our goalie! He had no experience at all. He just wanted to do anything to be part of the team. Things went exactly how you thought it would. It was bonkers.

For those of you who played you know how awful practices were when you only had one goaltender. Now imagine that goaltender not actually being a goaltender. I had top end talent on this team I didn’t want them to suffer like that. I actually suited up as a goalie in all of our practices to give us a second goaltender. I am not a goalie, but growing up our neighborhood rule for street hockey was everybody rotated through as a goalie. I never minded and I guess that is one of the few similarities I have with Sidney Crosby. I worked in our local pro shop so I had my own set of gear to fool around in. I played some men’s league in goal and even have a shutout to my name. I was competent even if I looked stylistically more like Hasek/Thomas than Patrick Roy. The players loved shooting on me. I think if I was eligible to play we would have actually won our championship. The coaches from the other team in our rink confronted one of our coaches and congratulated him on finding a new goalie who could make a save. He was told I was almost 30 years old and out of eligibility. We didn’t even need average goaltending that year and all the other teams knew it.

This didn’t change the impossible game day task of trying to play with a non-goaltender. We were an offensive machine and naturally we tried to insulate the goaltending problem by trying to play an ultra-defensive system. Think of the Devils in the 90’s or those Jacques Lemaire Wild teams. What we learned quickly is it didn’t matter how we were defensively deployed or even if we were nailing the system. We couldn’t hide our goaltending problem. Not only that, but we stopped being good at the things we were good at. We would lose 4-1 or 6-2 early in the season. We were so worried about defending we forgot how to attack. As a staff we finally said fuck it if we’re going to lose let’s go down swinging. We started winning games 7-4 or 8-5 against the mid-tier teams. We kept the gas pedal down and played to our strengths. When we played the other top teams, it didn’t matter. We outshot them, but it was what it was. Going through this experience is a big reason why I am always adamant for the Penguins (and other teams) to play to their strengths and not pretend to be something they aren’t.

As a coaching staff we tried our best to keep the practices upbeat and fun to keep morale up. Those kids knew they were getting jobbed for no fault of their own. They had all the natural reactions I talked about as a player above. We knew this, but there was nothing we could do other than be Ted Lasso like in our praise even when goals were scored against us. The players were great to the kid who was in net when they could have easily turned on him due to the situation. We actually won a few playoff games and when we played the top seed, we were down five goals after two periods. We talked about our adversity we faced during the year at intermission and how awesome they were. The players played their best period of the year. We scored four unanswered to pull within one and with about five minutes left we hit the crossbar. A minute later the ref called some lame ass ticky tack penalty and the other team scored and that was that.

I’ve never been prouder of a team. They kept their composure all season and did their absolute best to try and climb an unclimbable mountain. At the same time, I’ve never felt so powerless to help. As a coach you’re at the mercy of a lot of things out of your control. At least as a player you feel like you have a little bit of ownership in the solution because you can block a shot or score a goal. I really hope our staff did the best we could because those kids deserved it. I think we did, but you can’t help but wonder what our actual ceiling was. If nothing else I do think some good life lessons were learned about adversity and controlling the things you can control.

I think it could be an option, but I’m not sure the ++ is necessary. The Blues couldn’t even get Seattle to take him on for free. Tarasenko has been a great goal scorer for years. The three(?) shoulder surgeries are a tough thing because they’ve clearly taken their toll on his ability to perform. Tarasenko is due 7.5M for this year and next. Jason Zucker is due 5.5M per year for this year and next. The Penguins don’t have an extra 2M to take on and I’m not sure Tarasenko gives you more than Zucker. I think Zucker is capable of more than he gave last year. I think Mike Sullivan should be a little cleverer with his deployment and play Zucker with Crosby or Carter. He’ll have to with Malkin out and I think it is a good thing. This would allow Jake Guentzel to play with Malkin when he eventually comes back and we know that duo is very successful.

Here is a nice article about Jason Zucker and how playing with Crosby is a good idea.

There’s always a chance to make changes during the season. I just think you lose a lot of the different paths to doing so after the offseason. There were quite a number of opportunities for the Penguins to make a change at the goaltender position this offseason. Plenty of veterans were available and they decided to pass on it. The goaltender coach change almost seems like they are reaching deep for a hail mary to make the current duo work. They did sign Philip Lindberg so while not probable, it isn’t impossible he does the Matt Murray thing where his AHL numbers are too good to ignore.

I don’t think it would take too long considering if DeSmith was healthy he would have played in the playoffs in relief of Jarry. Last year very early in the regular season DeSmith took over for Jarry mid-game and then started a few games in a row due to Jarry’s lackluster play. If DeSmith were to show similar competency next year as he did this past year I do think Jarry’s playoff clunkers would linger in Mike Sullivan’s memory.

Thanks for reading!

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