I'm actually not against playing Kinkaid. I just don't buy that he's suddenly found a level of consistency he's never had in his entire career. He's had as many .920+ performances in his last 7 starts (5) as he had in his previous 19 starts. So more than likely he's due for a couple of bad performances here. If you want to at least give him the opportunity to start until he does regress, fine. But let's not think simply riding Kinkaid is going to turn things around.
I also think he might even be due for more starts where he plays well, but loses a hard luck 2-1 game, like he did against Carolina last week.
I believe more than anything that we can't have both of these guys here next year. Hynes probably knows he can't rely on both of them next year, we need to upgrade on one of them and Kinkaid is the easier one to make disappear.
I think we're slightly below league average in goals for, but like bottom 8 in goals against. Our shots against are just a little below league average, but not as bad as the goaltending.
Our shots against on the season is 2147 and goals against is 202. I think about 6 of those shots and 6 of those goals are empty netters, which are 100% shooting shots. Maybe 7 of each? Let's say the goalies have allowed 196 goals on 2141 shots faced. Team save percentage is a .909% and league average is .913%. If we had just .915% combined goaltending this year, we would have already allowed 8 fewer goals. That's gotta be worth 3-4 points already? We'd be in a good spot at 80 points, in front of a bunch of teams, rather than on life support.
Bad goaltending doesn't hurt you in the blowout games. Usually in a blowout game, the goalie is one of the lesser suspects and even the really good goalies have blowout games. Marty was good for some 5-6 goal against games, even in his prime years. It's the 3-2 losses where the crap goaltending hurts you. Think Calgary game recently, Minnesota game recently, the last loss to Boston when Lack played, every game lost this past week, which were 3-2. What if we had at least gotten 2-3 of those games just to OT and still lost? At least we have 2, 3, 4 more points.