How Good Was Halak?

The Montreal Canadiens have been eliminated from the playoffs on my birthday three times over the years in which I've been a fan of the team. I confess, I was fully expecting this year to become the fourth instance on that unhappy list. The Habs had fallen into a 3-1 deficit in their series against the mighty Capitals. They scraped out a 2-1 win in the fifth game, thanks to some stellar goaltending by Jaroslav Halak, but nobody thought they'd be able to do more than that. So on the day of Game Six, my birthday, I was pretty sure the Canadiens would end their season with yet another first-round elimination. It turned out Halak believed in himself and the team more than I did. He absorbed everything the Caps could throw at him, making an incredible 53 saves en route to a 4-1 triumph and a forced Game Seven. It was one hell of a birthday present. Afterwards, people who've been around for longer than I have said it was one of the best goaltending performances they'd seen, ever. It certainly was for me. I remember the legendary Patrick Roy OT against the Rangers in Game Three in 1986, and I thought Halak was as good as that.

When time passes, though, we tend to remember things differently. Saves get more miraculous, glove hands quicker and the number of shots more impossible as our memories soften the reality of what we witnessed. Sometimes, we go back to the video years later and what we recalled as being a brilliant performance was really kind of ordinary, with a few great saves thrown in. I wondered if it would be that way for Halak's Game Six miracle against Washington. Maybe, if we went back and looked at the tapes with an objective eye, it wouldn't really measure up to Roy or Dryden. Perhaps it was all a trick of perception; fans fooled by living so long without a miracle that even a minor miracle would seem spectacular.

As I wondered about that, and about how great Halak's playoff performance really was in the context of the great goalie performances Habs fans have witnessed over the years, I got an email from a reader. Michael Whitehouse is a stats guy, and he decided to look at the save percentages of Canadiens goalies in playoff series from 1986 to the present. The goalie had to have played at least three games in the series to be considered. Here's a chart of what he found, including save percentage and average number of shots faced per game:












That was intriguing enough to get Michael looking a bit farther into Habs history. He went back to 1971, to the amazing Ken Dryden performance in the playoffs that year. It turns out that in nearly forty years of Canadiens playoff goaltending, Jaro Halak is in the top five for save percentage in a series. Our perceptions are true and our memories aren't playing tricks on us. He really was that good.

Here's the link to Michael Whitehouse's chart documenting the goalie stats of every Canadiens playoff series since 1971. For those who have trouble deciphering the chart, Michael has concluded the top five performances for a Canadiens goalie in a playoff series since 1971 are as follows:

1. Steve Penney, 1984, Round 1 vs. Boston: .974 save percentage
2. Ken Dryden, 1976, Round 2 vs. Chicago: .973 save percentage
3. Ken Dryden, 1977, Round 2 vs. St. Louis: .962 save percentage
4. Patrick Roy, 1989, Round 3 vs. Philly: .940 save percentage
5. Jaroslav Halak, 2010, Round 1 vs. Washington: .939 save percentage

Maybe it'll turn out that Halak will be more Steve Penney than Ken Dryden when we look back at his career in twenty years. Or maybe he'll have a place among the greats by then. Either way, nothing can take away the fact that he played an incredible series against the Capitals and his name can be safely mentioned in the same breath as the best playoff performers in Habs history. In my memory, it'll be one of the best birthdays ever.

Ch-Ch-Changes

Every year, NHL general managers meet someplace sunny to talk about ways to make the game better. In the end, they seem to talk a lot, but the outcomes are fairly small achievements like modifying the size of goalie equipment. Last season, they finally at least talked about attempting to reduce concussions, but we'll still have to wait to see whether anything will actually change in the coming season. While concussions are a very serious issue that need attention immediately, there are other things with which general managers should concern themselves. Here are the top-ten things the NHL needs to change:

10. The delay-of-game penalty for shooting the puck over the glass. This is the dumbest penalty in hockey. It's certainly a deterrent from doing it on purpose, which a lot of defencemen and goalies used to do to get out of trouble. Now, however, we're seeing teams get penalized for doing it by accident. The problem is, it often happens when a team is already shorthanded and the defenceman panics under pressure. Someday, a very important goal is going to be scored on a power play after a DOG penalty, and that sucks. The league should make throwing the puck over the glass the same as icing, with a faceoff in the offending team's zone and no line change permitted.

9. Points. Get rid of them. The NHL has a winner and a loser in every game. There's no need for points anymore. Making some games worth three points creates an imbalance in the standings, rewarding teams for losing. The league should dump the points and go by wins and losses like every other major sport does.

8. Fighting. Eliminate it. The game has evolved beyond fisticuffs at this point. There's no evidence to support the myth that great numbers of fans come out to see fights, or would stay away if fights were banned. There are very, very few fights in the playoffs when the hockey is at its best. Solid leagues like the European pro leagues and U.S. college leagues, somehow manage to play great hockey without fighting. The old-time fight sparked by passion and real anger has mostly disappeared, leaving the sport with staged, emotionless bouts that do little to change the direction of a game. On the other hand, encouraging fighting in junior hockey puts kids at risk of serious injury or even death for no good reason. Rewarding teenagers for fighting encourages aggressive, violent behaviour outside of the rink as well. And fighting in the pros leads to avoidable injury...just ask Sheldon Souray, who could be losing his NHL job early because he missed so much time after getting hurt fighting.

7. Contracts. The CBA doesn't allow anything to change a contract after it's been agreed by both parties. Obviously, it's important for players' security that teams not have the right to contract do-overs. Every GM in the league would be backpedalling on big, fat, ill-advised deals if they could. It's unfortunate, though, that players themselves can't ask for a renegotiation. I know Cristobal Huet was thrilled to score big money with Chicago, but now, with the team in a serious cap crunch, it's very likely Huet will be dumped in the minors. He may be fine with collecting his millions in the AHL or Europe, but what if he's not? If he's the kind of player who'd like to stay in the NHL for a couple of million less, he should have the opportunity to cut that deal with management. Of course, if players had the right to renegotiate, they'd also be vulnerable to pressure from management to do so, even if it's not what they want. That's a concern, but it's really no different than players getting pressured to waive no-trade clauses in contracts they've negotiated in good faith. They can just say no, after all.

6. Replay. The NHL is futuristic in its use of replay compared to baseball or soccer. The biggest gap now, though, is with missed injuries. If a player is writhing on the ice or obviously bleeding with no call, the refs should be allowed to say, "Hey, we didn't see what happened there. Let's go to the replay." It would give the officials another tool to help them police the game justly. The league should also consider instituting replay challenges to be used at the coach's discretion once per game, similar to the rule in NFL football. Officials are human; they screw up. With replay challenges, if a coach sees something the refs don't, it would give him a chance to correct a call that could change a game's outcome.

5. Specialists. There are a lot of guys around with one particular skill, who aren't really that good at much else. (See: Bergeron, Marc-Andre) There is, however, a way to give some guys with only one marketable skill a place in the NHL. The number of players a team can dress for a game should be increased from 20 to 21, so specialists can have a role, without having to play a regular shift. Baseball does it with the DH and football has the place kicker. The extra guy on a hockey team could be a guy like Bergeron, who specializes in the point shot for the PP. It could be a guy who only plays on the PK. Maybe it's a guy like Yanic Perreault, who's otherworldly on faceoffs, but can't do much else. Or it could be a player who's too small or slow to survive in a game, but who's spectacular in the shootout. That way, coaches wouldn't be forced to increase the workload of his better players, or screw up his line formations to fit in a guy who's only good at one thing...no more sitting Ryan O'Byrne just to get Bergeron's shot in the lineup. The NHLPA should support such a move because it would offer more opportunities to members who wouldn't otherwise make the NHL, or whose skills are fading and could use the specialist spot to hang on for an extra year or two.

4. Taxes. The salary cap is extremely inequitable, as we've seen in the case of the Canadiens, because of the variance in local tax rates. For example, if a free agent is considering signing with either the Canadiens or the Lightning, and both teams are offering him $5-million a year over a five-year contract, he's got to consider how much of that money he'll actually take home. In Tampa, he's got to pay 35% of it in federal income tax, while, in Montreal, the feds only take 29%. Unfortunately for the Canadiens, however, the state of Florida doesn't take an extra share of the player's income for itself, while the province of Quebec taxes at 24%. So, in Tampa, that $25-million deal translates to $16.25-million in take-home pay. In Quebec, it's only $13.25-million. That's a fair chunk of change for anyone, even a rich hockey player. That means the Canadiens have to offer a player a million dollars more a year to even be in the same take-home ballpark. Since all teams operate under the same cap, that means while the Habs are paying more for their top players, they end up with less for a strong supporting cast. If the NHL is serious about establishing parity in the league, it needs to make the salary cap applicable after taxes. In other words, teams dealing with higher local taxes could exceed the salary cap by the difference in tax rates, using the lowest-taxed NHL location as the base. Therefore, if Tampa's %35 rate is the lowest, compared to Montreal's %53, the Canadiens should be able to spend %18 more than the Panthers or Lightning can on player salaries. Otherwise, the cap inevitably favours teams in lower-taxed jurisdictions.

3. Composite sticks. Ban them. Composites are lighter and allow a player to shoot harder, no doubt. BUT, they break at terrible times, as Saku Koivu and Team Finland can attest, after losing the Olympic gold medal game on a broken-stick faceoff, and the Red Wings will second, after losing a vital playoff game when Nik Lidstrom's stick broke to allow a breakaway. They're also causing a lot of injuries when players block shots at the kinds of speeds composites allow. And they're hugely expensive. Players went to composite because they perceived a competitive advantage by doing so. There's no definitive evidence that composites are markedly better than wood. Composite sticks in hockey are the equivalent of aluminum bats in baseball. Just as the bats give hitters an unfair advantage over fielders, the sticks give shooters an edge on defenders. The NHL should insist on wood, just like baseball does.

2. Contracts, part two. Teams are able to beat the cap right now by offering huge, front-loaded contracts for long term that will bring the average cap hit down to a manageable number. The Hossa contract in Chicago and the Pronger deal in Philly are two examples. Now Lou Lamoriello is rumoured to be offering Ilya Kovalchuk a seventeen-year deal that would meet Kovalchuck's $100-million contract demand, but reduce the cap hit for the Devils to less than $6-million, which will disappear when Kovalchuk retires long before the seventeen years are up. It's a legal loophole in the CBA, but it gives strong teams the best shot at the best players. If a team wants to stack its lineup, it can do so by filling it with great players on cheap cap hits. The argument in favour of this is that any team can do the same thing. That's true, in theory, but if a player has a chance to play for a Cup contender or a bottom-feeder for the long-term, he's going to pick the team where he can win. That creates a system with powerful contenders versus poor cousins that can't attract good players. There are two ways for the league to counter the long-term, front-loaded loophole. One is to make a player's actual annual salary, not the average over the term of the contract, count against the cap each season. Alternately, the current clause that forces a team to absorb the cap hit of any player who signs after the age of 35, regardless of whether he retires during the deal, could be expanded. It could include any player who turns 35 while signed to a long-term deal. That way, if a team is on the hook for all salary committed to a player after he's 35, it eliminates the advantage in signing players until they're over 40 to beat the cap.

And, the number one thing the NHL needs to change:

1. The draft. In a cap world, teams rely heavily on good, cheap, young talent. The most cost-efficient way to build a team is by drafting that talent and developing it within the team's system. The problem is, drafting 18-year-old kids is a total crap shoot. The average 18-year-old player hasn't finished growing and, in many cases, hasn't gained control of his own skills. If he gets hurt in his draft year, he risks not being chosen at all. A team that invests money, resources and draft picks in these kids depends in large part on luck in hoping those investments pay off. The NHL used to draft players at age 20, when they were more mature physically and emotionally. The only reason the age shifted was to counter the WHA, which resorted to drafting teenagers to stake a claim on the best talent before the NHL did in the '70s. Now, with no North American competition for that talent, it would benefit teams to go back to drafting players at 20. They'd have a much better handle on what they're getting in the players they pick. It'd be good for the vast majority of the kids too. Some of them have to make the agonizing decision about whether to play junior hockey or college. Often, they choose junior because they think it's the quickest way to get noticed by scouts and get drafted. Moving the draft age to 20 would make it easier for players to choose a year or two of college while playing hockey. It would be tough for the very elite teenage players who outstrip the competition in their age group and are ready for the NHL at 18 or 19. For most, though, the extra time to develop before having to worry about the draft would be beneficial.

Those are the most important issues, outside of concussions, the NHL needs to address. We can rest assured that at the next GM's or Board of Governor's meetings, none of them will be on the agenda.

What Price Price?

Decisions, decisions. The NHL offseason in the cap era is all about making smart choices. GMs have to make sure they hold onto their core assets, let the right guys go and supplement the roster with the best free agents they can get. They have to do it all while keeping to contract limits, staying under the cap and planning for how things will play out for about four years down the line. Unfortunately for fans, a lot of general managers aren't smart enough to do all that. They get blinded by ambition and backed into corners just like ordinary mortals. Sometimes, not being truly psychic, they just pick the wrong players.

So, what does a smart GM do with Carey Price? What does one offer a young, talented, entitled goaltender whom one has already clearly declared will be the go-to guy for the foreseeable future? It's a tough number to determine.

On one hand, you've got Price's resume. He's got the advantage of being a high first-round draft pick, which means the Canadiens already have a lot invested in him. When a team gets to pick in the top-five, it needs that pick to pan out or risk setting the organization back for years. It's easy now to think about what might have happened if the Habs had chosen Anze Kopitar instead of Price, and what the lineup and the cap situation might look like with him at centre instead of Gomez, with Halak in goal. To keep people from dwelling...unhappily...on that "what if," the Canadiens really need Price to be great. They've given him more chances than most young players get, which proves how badly they want him to be a success. So that's in Price's favour.

Also on his side are his minor-league accomplishments; the rather dusty World Junior Championship gold medal and Calder Cup title with the Bulldogs. He's also had some flashes of brilliance at the NHL level and been voted into the league's All-Star game.

Balancing the scale on the other side, though, is his inconsistency. There's certainly cause for concern there. Price has long had a penchant for allowing a soft or weird goal at bad times, which means he's not usually a "shutout" type of goalie. In two of his three NHL seasons, he's had a long stretch of losing games and found himself unable to bounce back. In his rookie year, he was sent to Hamilton to recover. Last year, he lost his starting job to Jaro Halak. Of course, losing isn't always the goalie's fault. As any cliche-monger will tell you, it's a team game, and often, when Price has been losing, the rest of the team has sucked too. Overall, Price's career numbers aren't bad.

There are also questions about his maturity. We've all seen him act out on the ice when he's angry or disappointed. We've heard the stories about him busting the drywall in the visitor's room after one loss, and crying after others. We've wondered about the allegations that he took a little too fondly to the night life in Montreal. On the flip side, most of his teammates and his boss speak positively about his acceptance of the backup role during the playoffs and his hard work when he wasn't playing.

His agent will surely argue that Price's stats compare favourably to other young goalies like Cam Ward and Marc-Andre Fleury at the same age. And, if negotiations go really hard-ball, Price's camp has in its favour the indisputable fact that Pierre Gauthier's back is to the wall. Gauthier has chosen Price over Halak, and hired the unimpressive Alex Auld to back him up. This is Price's team, and that's inevitably going to play in contract talks. It's too late now to muse that maybe Gauthier should have tried to sign Price before trading Halak, or at least before signing Auld. Price's number-one annointing has given him the trump card in these negotiations.

So, what should he get? As we know, goalies are usually a dime a dozen, and as we've seen this summer, there are usually a few good ones kicking around for hire at a decent rate. With that in mind, and considering that Price is basically a big 'ol bundle of potential tied up with unanswered questions, there's an argument to be made for him to get a one-year deal at similar money to what he would have made last year if he'd hit his bonuses; about two million dollars. A one-year deal tells Price that yes, he's the number-one guy right now, but continuing in that role will depend on his performance in the coming season. An audition year, if you like. A do-over on last season.

The very fact that the team wants so badly for Price to succeed, however, means Gauthier won't play hardball. Price's agent will argue for a long-term deal, at least four years, with an escalating salary. It's safe to bet Price will come in at around a three-million dollar cap hit for four years, slightly more if the deal is for five seasons.

There are always hard choices to make in the summertime, but for Pierre Gauthier, this one is a career-maker. Or breaker. It's all up to Carey Price.

Off With the Head!

There's a well-established tradition in the NHL that fans recognize and honour, and which nobody in the league establishment acknowledges. It manifested itself at the entry draft in Los Angeles and the Stanley Cup presentation in Philadelphia this year, but it's the same no matter wherever or whenever those events are held. It's a universal bond of NHL fanhood to boo Gary Bettman as loudly and rudely as possible.

It's not difficult to comprehend why fans don't like Bettman; especially Canadian fans. His gimmicky interest in increasing goal scoring, his insistence on forcing the southern-market agenda and his blatant disregard of the interests of Canadian-based teams that stand as the backbone of the league's economy drive most real hockey fans nuts. The year of no hockey just to force the salary cap issue didn't help either. What is hard to understand, though, is why the owners still put up with him.

The current bunch of team owners didn't, after all, hire Bettman to begin with. He was parachuted into the job by none other than convicted fraudster Bruce McNall. The then-Kings owner was the NHL's golden boy back in 1992. He'd pulled off the trade of the century in bringing Wayne Gretzky to Los Angeles. Hockey, which had been at best a carnival side-show, the poor cousin who shared digs with the mighty Lakers, suddenly became cool in one of the biggest markets in America. That McNall was able to pull off such a feat, with a team that had been an NHL footnote for its lifetime, lent him a golden glow most in the hockey world unabashedly admired. McNall was elected chairman of the league's Board of Governors...the NHL's second-highest position...in 1992. It fell to the Board and McNall to hire a commissioner to run the league. Gil Stein was in office at the time, and McNall got rid of him by promising him a spot in the Hockey Hall of Fame if he'd step down. That opened the door for McNall's choice: the guy who was second-in-command of the NBA. That guy turned down the job, and McNall went for the third-in-command of the basketball league: Gary Bettman.

The Gretzky Effect in L.A. was inspirational for a lot of nouveau riche potential owners. A lot of guys thought they could make hockey fly in places where ice was only found in drinks and hockey was a game played by prep-school girls in short skirts. Bettman sold a vision to those guys. The league was taking off, he said, and there'd be fans flocking to southern markets once they'd been introduced to the game, just like in L.A. A big, national TV deal wouldn't be far behind.

Of course, it didn't work out that way. Ownership of many of the southern teams has been unstable and, in some cases, criminal. Speculators who bought into the NHL promise soon found out the game was a harder sell than Bettman had led them to believe. Now the NHL has been forced to take over in Phoenix. Ownership in Florida, Atlanta and Dallas is shaky. Teams that actually make money, like the Habs, have to share revenue with the teams who give tickets away just to get butts in the seats. The NHL is, by no means, an owner's dream club.

After all, when the "NHL" is paying the bills of the Phoenix Coyotes, that actually means the other owners are footing the cost. When Bettman's personal vendetta against Jim Balsillie prevents the purchase of the team, it means he's downloading the cost of his hubris on the rest of the owners.

Seventeen years after his appointment as league commissioner, there's still no national television deal for hockey in the United States. Canadian teams are still providing 37% of league total revenue, but are a minority when it comes to league decision-making. Bettman gives condescending interviews about how the NHL will "someday" expand to Canada but fans will need to be patient. Meanwhile, several of his sunbelt teams are in real danger of going belly up, and Bettman won't consider relocation as an option for saving them.

Fans of teams like the Canadiens, who want to see an equitable system of sharing wealth that includes consideration of local tax rates, are ignored. That's why they're mad. The teams fans love are being held hostage by a little man from basketball who hasn't delivered on his big promises. It's a mystery why the owners are still not noticing Bettman's wearing no clothes.

When he gets booed, commentators make note. They chuckle indulgently as the catcalls rain down on Bettman's head. Underneath the tradition, the "we must boo Bettman because it's expected" performance, though, there's real anger. Fans don't like him because he's not been good for the game. The owners need to wake up and realize why people are jeering the guy who's supposed to be leading the league into the future.

Drunken Sailors

If we can learn anything from NHL free agency, it's that panic and greed make uncomfortable bedfellows. Players in the primes of their careers can see the end, if not near, then at least within spittin' distance. They want the most money they can get because the bodies that buy them a life of privilege don't last for long. Who can blame them, if they peddle the remaining use of those bodies to the highest bidders? Most of them are trained for little else, and must make the most of their physical tickets to financial security.

On the side of teams, there's pressure to get better and do it as quickly as possible. General managers know their time is finite too. They want a winning team on their resumes, and they aren't overly concerned with consequences that will inevitably arise on the watches of their successors.

When those two tides; the greed of self-preservation and the panic of being the guy who comes up empty on free agent day meet, they create a perfect storm of overpayment and almost-certain future regret.

Remember June, 2007? Sheldon Souray had just scored 26 goals for the Habs and set an NHL record for powerplay goals by a defenceman in a season. He wasn't the hottest in his own end, but he could fight, he was a strong leader on the team, and oh! That shot! We saw him once break a defenceman's stick on its blurred path directly to the back of the net. And, what about the time he put the puck right through the twine? Back then, he could have picked his dream job. Bob Gainey offered him big money to stay in Montreal. Souray says other teams offered him more. In the end, sentiment and money combined to lead him home to Edmonton. He was a local boy who remembered the glory days of the team and thought the modern incarnation operated on the same plane.

Flash forward three years into a five-year deal and Souray has cleared waivers, after suffering two injury-plagued seasons and a feud with management that's culminated in aspersions against his character on the team's part and irreparable public bridge-burning on his. Now, he'll either spend the remainder of his contract in the minors, he'll be forced to go to Europe for work, or the Oilers will bite the bullet on half of his salary for two years after they put him on re-entry waivers. None of the likely outcomes of his impasse with the Oilers will be his choice. The bright hope of free agency has become a bitter disappointment for him AND the team.

The thing is, Souray's not alone. The list of guys who've signed their dream contracts only to have them turn into nightmares is long and sad. Brad Richards in Tampa. Jason Blake and Brian McCabe in Toronto. Alexei Yashin on Long Island. Scott Gomez, Chris Drury, Michal Rozsival and Wade Redden with the Rangers. Christobal Huet and Brian Campbell in Chicago. Mathieu Schneider in Anaheim. All of them have either been dumped by the teams that signed them with great expectations, or know their teams would love now to get rid of the contracts if anyone would take them. It's only a matter of time before guys like Dany Heatley, Jason Spezza, Daniel Briere and Vincent Lecavalier top their teams' "get rid of" lists.

General managers, in this set-up, have the high road staked out. They're just trying to make their teams better, after all. If they make a mistake on a big signing out of the panic of being left without a chair on musical free agent day, the fans are later supportive of dumping the player in most cases. The player's the one who gets the grief for being overpaid and a disappointment.

Scott Gomez is a good example. He's a fine player. He's smart, courageous and skilled. He also signed a contract that priced him about two million dollars a year higher than his stats say he should make, relative to the market. When he did so, he surely thought about his long-term future. I wonder if he considered the constant second-guessing he'd face about his salary, and how it would make him defensive about those questions? I wonder if maybe, when he's home in Alaska, he feels a little bit uncomfortable when his old friends jab at him about his wealth? It might seem a small price for him to pay for setting up his future security, but it can't be fun to be made feel he's not earning the money he makes. And he's one of the lucky ones. He landed with another NHL team willing to take on his monster deal. Others will follow the Souray path and the humiliation of being waived and passed over.

Now there's Ilya Kovalchuk. The Islanders have reportedly offered him ten million dollars for ten years. It's impossible for that deal to work out in the player's favour, outside of the actual money. There's no way a player who's already 27 years old can produce enough points to keep fans and management happy enough for the next ten years, to justify that kind of salary. Maybe he just wants the money. Maybe he doesn't mind the idea that he'll inevitably become an albatross around that team's salary cap when its young players need to be paid well too. They'll want to get rid of him, and he'll be hurt if he cares for things like respect and dignity.

Because as much as players say "it's a business," I think most of them don't believe it in their hearts. Hockey, after all, is all about heart. Management expects players to sacrifice their bodies, accept pain and injury and perform through illness and fatigue. The bosses, in their clean offices, expect no less and consider the millions they shell out to be appropriate compensation. The players want to give what's expected, but human frailty sometimes prevents that. In their hearts, players think their limitations will be understood. That's the line between their definition of business and that of the managers. Players think doing their best is enough. Managers, who feel they're not getting their money's worth, say otherwise.

That's why a smart player with bargaining power should think about taking a little less term or a little less money. It's not like they won't be set for life with a million dollars less in the long run. But it might help them avoid a lot of bitterness when the biggest deal they can score turns sour, as so many of them do. In the NHL, five years is a lifetime and, unless the timing and the player are exactly right, long deals become outdated long before the player is ready for that to happen. All because panic and greed collided on the first day of July.

Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Goalies

There's a new rule of team-building in the salary-capped NHL, and it's not a good one for the last line of defence. Once upon a time, general managers lived by the "build from the net out" principal. Start with a great goalie, they reasoned, and then make the rest of your team work around him. It was a proven technique. Sam Pollock did it with great success in Montreal. His modern-day disciple, Lou Lamoriello has redone it with Martin Brodeur in New Jersey. Times are changing, though, and changing fast.

NHL GMs tend to be a bit monkey-see, monkey-do when picking up players in free agency. In 2007, after the Ducks won the Cup with a big, aggressive team, everyone wanted big, aggressive forwards and Scott Hartnell was one of the most-coveted free agents. Then, in 2008 and 2009, when Detroit and Pittsburgh won with fast, skilled teams, everyone changed gears and started looking for fast, skilled players. Brian Campbell and Marian Hossa topped every team's wish list. This year Philly and Chicago got to the Stanley Cup Finals with gritty, skilled teams with negligible goaltending, and everyone has decided goaltending doesn't matter all that much.

In the first 24 hours of free agency, the average player contract signed was worth $1.59 million dollars. The average goalie contract was worth only $1.04 million. The gap is actually much wider, though. Of 56 skaters signed, 16 of them have cap hits of $3-million or more. Not one goalie signed for more than $2-million against the cap.

This is not a league in which the netminder is god anymore. Teams are looking around and deciding that the big-money goalies aren't earning their pay. Luongo, Brodeur and Miller were out in the first round of the playoffs. Lundqvist and Kiprusoff didn't make it at all, and Thomas, Huet, Osgood and Theodore became humble backups to their kid partners. On the other hand, Michael Leighton and Antti Niemi ended up in the Stanley Cup Finals and Jaroslav Halak played the best goal of the post-season. All of them made less than a million dollars. GMs have figured out they don't really need to shell out big money for goalies anymore.

Exhibit A: Jaroslav Halak leads the Habs to the third round of the playoffs with some of the most spectacular goaltending we've seen since Patrick Roy. Habs decide they can't afford to pay him three or four million a year, even though they're paying other players ridiculous amounts of money relative to their contributions to playoff success. Habs trade Halak to St.Louis for prospects. Andrei Kostitsyn, who did nothing outside Game Two in Washington, remains a Hab.

Exhibit B: July 1, 2010. Goalies available include former Vezina and Hart winner Jose Theodore, former Stars stalwart Marty Turco and former powerhouse goalie Evgeni Nabokov. They're joined by a bunch of also-rans who change teams every second year, if not every year. Who's signed at the end of the day? The also-rans. The guys with the great resumes get nothing. It's a market in which good goalies are overqualified for the position and get no interest.

It's not just the money, either. Goalies are also getting little in the way of job security. The average player contract in the first 24 hours of free agency was for 2.125 years. Goalies signed for only 1.45 years on average. Goalies are becoming disposable, in the way that coaches have always been. And, Brodeur aside, when was the last time a goalie played his entire career with one team? Even Luongo has been traded twice. Bryzgalov and Anderson, two of the league's top-ten winning goalies last season, have been through waivers. Now, if a goalie is coming up for renewal, if he wants greater term or money than the cap will allow, the GM can just shrug and let him walk.

The turnover among goalies is pretty amazing too, relative to other players. Of the top-ten winning goalies five years ago, eight of them are no longer with those teams. Four don't currently have NHL jobs at all. Compare that to the top-ten point producers, and you see only five of them having changed teams. Only one of them, Jaromir Jagr, is no longer in the league.

The funny thing is, even though they're getting little respect on the contract side of things, goalies still get more than their share of the kudos or blame for a win or a loss. Halak was superman in the playoffs, and nobody remembers the shots Gill and Gorges blocked. Luongo was the goat in Vancouver's loss to Chicago, and a lot of fans were ready to lynch him.

Being a goalie is honestly becoming the hardest job to get, and keep in the NHL. Maybe it's because it's just basically a hard job. The shots are harder, faster and more accurate now than they were before the advent of the composite stick, and on any given night, 18 different players can be firing anywhere from 20 to 50 shots on goal. Perhaps it's because there's always a younger or cheaper option available for teams who only need to fill two slots each season, so they have no problem dumping a goalie who gets too old or expensive. Or maybe it's because goaltending has become such a science, the difference between a really good NHL goalie and a merely decent one is very small.

Whatever the reason for the trend away from opening the coffers for a goalie, it's bad news for netminders who want to cash in. These days, being a defenceman is the way to go. Teams who want to copy Philly and Chicago's makeup see strong defence in front of those no-name goalies. It's no coincidence, then, that the biggest money handed out since the free agent market opened has been to the better available defencemen. Of the sixteen guys who got deals with a cap hit of more than $3-million a year, ten of them are blueliners. This is the new way NHL teams are building, and goalies like Turco and Nabokov may have to settle for a lot less than they're actually worth.

Whoop-Dee-Freakin'-Do

Well, I hope Carey Price can play close to 82 games this year. And I hope he can win a good chunk of them, because Pierre Gauthier has given the Canadiens no other choice. Cristobal Huet and Jaroslav Halak threatened Price's role as the annointed number-one goalie in Montreal and both of them got the boot. So, when Gauthier went shopping for a backup, he made sure to pick someone who's absolutely no threat to Price. He got that by spending a million bucks on a lousy goalie.

The CH will be Alex Auld's eighth NHL sweater, his seventh in the last four years. When a goalie can't hold a backup spot for more than a season at a time, you know he's destined for a career as an afterthought. This signing is fine (if overpriced by about a third) if you've got a starting goalie who plays seventy-plus games a year and has proven his ability to handle the workload and to bring his best every night. It's maybe not such a great idea when you have a designated number-one goaltender who has never played more than 52 games in a season and has had both extraordinary bad luck and difficulties dealing with failure.

There's no doubt now, if there had ever been any, that Carey Price is the unquestioned number-one. He will have no choice but to play the lion's share of the games, because Auld is not good enough to steal his job. There will be no "veteran mentor" thing happening, because Auld isn't good enough to teach Price much of anything, especially about being a starting goalie in a city like Montreal. And the Habs had better hope Price doesn't get hurt for any length of time, or they'll be no better off than the Flyers or Senators in nets.

More importantly, however, the Habs have to hope Price is really ready and able to take on the role and the workload management has definitively handed to him. Signing Auld has effectively removed Price's safety net, and, for a team that has no guarantee of being in the playoffs, it's placing a huge burden of responsibility on Price. His failure doesn't bear consideration.

I join all Canadiens fans in wishing Carey Price the best. The team will live or die with him now as it never has had to do before. It'll be a defining year for the guy who'll now be tending the Habs net virtually by himself.