Ok, so Lindgren has a 25 game sample size of being an above average NHL goalie at 30 years old so lets trade the 25 year old goalie who made the rookie All Star team and has had some good stretches in his 2nd season for a 30 year old journeyman and hope for the best? Might as well just made Pickard the starter in that case.
This whole debate is tiring. I'm not saying that Skinner is without flaws, I'm not saying that he hasn't been poor since the ASB, I can understand why folks don't trust him but it irks me that so many of you are so eager and willing to ship him out of town and come up with no surefire upgrade to supplant him. If they get Saros then of course you get rid of Skinner or relegate him to backup but for Lindgren? Well, color me skeptical.
Let me just address a few things.
1.) A few posters are of the "we can't spend anything on goaltending!" camp so names like Lindgren, Nedeljkovic, Kakhonen, MAF, etc. are being suggested as cheaper insurance options ala Adin Hill who was putting up decent numbers on bad teams before Vegas took a chance on him as their no.4 goalie for peanuts and ended up winning a Cup because of it.
If you don't like it, then by all means, go suggest how we get an established starter with miles under their belt like a Saros or Markstrom.
2.) Skinner was red hot last year too going into the playoffs (Oilers won 13/14, their "tandem" looked great). And then what happened? He immediately shit the bed vs. LA and did everything he could to get the Oilers eliminated in round 1 before killing us in round 2.
3.) Skinner has the same weaknesses as he did last year, and his numbers are worse than last year. He is still very slow post to post. He is still extremely slow on the ice, there is no second/third effort once he gets down on the ice that you see from other goalies. He still has a tendency to spit rebouds out right into juicy scoring areas, Vegas in particular looks like they even scout for this tendancy, throwing nothing shots at Skinner's pads from the point non stop. And it works, they generally get a goal per game extra because of it.
When he is off his game a bit, then we also see him start allowing goals from distance to eek past him even when he is supposed to be "square" to the puck, been seeing this happen again to him since the All-Star break. A legit, confident goalie corrects this issue within a game and shakes it off, with Skinner as we've seen since the All-Star break it becomes an issue that bleeds into multiple games.
He doesn't have any ability to take over a game pretty much ever. And no, you don't need to be Hasek to do that, Mike Smith and Cam Talbot did it plenty of times here. Roloson did it for entire series' at a time in 2006 to get the Oilers to a Cup Final.
Young goalies can take 3/4/5 years to really find their playoff stride, and a lot of them never do. That's how it works with these guys.
Who really believes Skinner is going to hold up for 3, let alone 4 playoff rounds? The fact is too we could be looking at our hardest round right in round 1 (likely Vegas). To me it's more a question of when either Pickard or (gulp) Campbell are forced to take over the net in the playoffs, not if.
