I previously handed out grades for Ottawa's forwards and defensemen. Today's post, the final part of the mini-series, will cover Ottawa's pair of goaltenders.
Craig Anderson - A goalie's job is to stop pucks. And while I have a lot of time and sympathy for the amount and quality of shots both Craig Anderson and back-up Robin Lehner faced this year, they certainly hold a share of the blame for the team's dreadful placement in the goals against column. Most sensible people knew that Craig Anderson was due for a futile bout with an undefeated boxer known as regression, but I'm not sure many expected his numbers to slide as wildly as they did. Consider this rolling graph of performance, starting at the beginning of the lockout-shortened season, through today. It's kind of nuts.
MHere's the tricky thing with Anderson, I think. He was so bad for the first half of the season (behind a team that was comparatively subpar), it was almost unfathomable that the team was still within striking distance of a playoff spot for most of the season. Anderson, to his credit, really elevated his game in the second-half of the year. I think that goes unnoticed because most people had chalked up the season as a lost cause by the middle of March. Still, it's not hard to see that as soon as Ottawa started stopping some pucks, the team started winning a bunch of games -- even if many of those came in garbage time as the club played out the string.
We knew the initial regression bug was going to bite. But, even with that statement bolded and underlined last summer, you just can't really make headway in today's National Hockey League with your starting goaltender posting a .911 over the course of a full season. So, as much as Anderson wants to (and has) blame the defense in front of him for brutal lapses in play, it's not as if Anderson was making a really strong argument in his own right.
If you're looking for something encouraging, it certainly seems to me that Craig Anderson was victimized an awful lot by just terrible goaltending performance on the penalty kill. Considering how random/volatile penalty kill percentages are at the goaltending position, you really prefer to see a guy who can -- long-term, long-sample, whatever -- stop pucks with regularity at even-strength. To some degree, that was happening.
Grade: C
Robin Lehner - You can more or less parse huge sections of Craig Anderson's write-up here. Lehner has the same beef with a shockingly bad blue line, the same beef with the number of unblocked shots that made it to the net, and so forth. Lehner's dynamic is a bit more interesting, though. The coaching staff was reluctant to use him when he was white-hot earlier in the season, then leaned on him big late in the season when Craig Anderson went down with injury. Lehner sort of self-destructed in that stretch -- it's going to take probably a full summer, if not longer, to purge this from his memory.
I try not to point to intangible stuff like confidence to explain why things happen or don't happen in smaller samples, but it's hard not to be curious about where Lehner's head was at when things were going south. You got the sense that the kid really couldn't cope with a random transition from "brick wall" to "can't stop a beach ball" in, like, a matter of weeks. That's the frustrating thing about the goaltending position, I guess, for everyone involved. In the right stretch, you have a force field in front of you. And in the wrong stretch, you're giving up goals on unscreened wristers from the blue-line.
You could sense the coaching staff wasn't enamored with Lehner's play when they needed him to be their #1, and I don't really blame them for losing a bit of confidence in him in that respect. But, I think perspective is sort of important, long-term anyway.
Perspective in the sense that, in a season that might have been as bad as it gets for Robin Lehner, he still ended with a .913 SV% in thirty-six appearances -- finishing .002% ahead of the starter, Craig Anderson.
So, I think you can say that Robin Lehner had sort of a poor season, while still scoring him comparatively (and maybe even favorably) to Craig Anderson. As much as this team believes Craig Anderson is the starter and Robin Lehner is the back-up, I think they -- now more than ever, and it's only going to get increasingly contentious over the next season or so -- have to be prepared for an inevitable changing of the guard.
Grade: C
Thanks for reading!