Im not buying he's declining... I don't think the drop in SV% over the last two years means much... I don't think the .920's meant that much either
I don't think he was ever as good as people thought, I think sv% numbers without any results or ever playing a real heavy workload/large number of games in a season, tricked a lot of people into believing he was something he never was.
I don't think he's a bad goalie, I just think the top 5 talk was always kind of silly.
I think he's declining, eye test tells me he's not who he was when we got him. Let me pull it up for you, I've kept track of this stuff for years. He allowed 122 goals in 15-16 in 58 games, you know how many that I had him counted down for stoppable goals? 23 out of 122. That's a little under 19% of the goals he allowed. I can't believe he only had a .924 save percentage that year, seemed like it should have been a .930 with how few stoppable goals he allowed.
Let's go to 16-17
163 goals allowed in 60 games played. I think 46 or 47 goals were stoppable? That's like 28%-29%, that's a huge increase in stoppable goals allowed and a huge decrease in the save percentage.
This year? 105 goals allowed so far in 38 games played. I have him down for 26 stoppable ones so far. 5 of those have come in the last 3 games. That's almost 26% of the goals allowed. It's not terrible, but it's not good either.
I have Kinkaid down for 26 stoppable goals also, just by coincidence, only he's done that in 10 fewer games.
I have Lack down for 6 stoppable goals on 11 allowed as a Devil in total. Appleby with 1 stoppable goal allowed on just 3 goals allowed. That's just about 60 stoppable goals on the goalies this year out of 196 goals that have been scored on non-empty nets against us this year. That's over 30% right there. If we cut 10, 15, 20 goals off of that, we're talking, I don't know, anywhere from 4 more points to maybe 8 more points currently?