In this edition of the hotstove, we share our choices for most underrated player on the Detroit Red Wings.
Todd Cordell
Jonathan Bernier.
Bernier has moved around a lot of late – Detroit is his 4th team in five years – but, make no mistake, he is still a solid goaltender.
His .907 save percentage on the year doesn’t pop off the page. When you dig a little deeper, it’s easy to see the value he has provided the Red Wings.
Bernier posted a .921 SV% at 5v5. He stopped pucks at a higher rate than Pekka Rinne, Carey Price, Carter Hart, Henrik Lundqvist, Marc-Andre Fleury, Frederik Andersen and John Gibson in that gamestate. Impressive, I’d say.
He also won 40% of his regulation decisions this season. That’s honestly something to write home about on a catastrophically bad Red Wings team.
Detroit won only ~25% of their regulation decisions prior to the pause, with Jimmy Howard, Calvin Pickard, and Eric Comrie – every goaltender other than Bernier – picking up regulation wins at a shockingly poor ~7% clip.
As horrendous as Detroit was this season, they could have been even worse without Bernier’s stable goaltending. He had a good year on a historically bad team and I don’t think he gets enough recognition for that.
Sean Maloughney Selecting an underrated player on the Red Wings is...challenging to put it politely. The best option I can come up with is the strong season by the young Robbi Fabbri. Fabbri has had to deal with a number of career threatening injuries so far in his young career but even though the Red Wings are a pile of not being a very good team at the moment, Fabbri still put up 31 points through 51 games, leading the team with 6 powerplay goals as well as game winning goals with 3. The only thing I find more impressive than Fabbri scoring 3 game winning goals is seeing that the Red Wings actually won 3 games.
The entire roster struggled for the Red Wings but Fabbri proving he can score at a similar rate when he was a regular on the Blues on a much weaker roster deserves some notice.
Numbers via NaturalStatTrick.com
Recent posts