He is being sarcastic but at the end of day Wolf having basically 0 practice time with the team playing on a back to back and then having the team play pretty poorly in front of him of course we will give him the benefit of the doubt. Mistakes happen and he has to make them to learn. But there is a massive difference between Wolf making a mistake and Vlad making one. Vlad has had several years in the league and statistically gotten worse each year here which in its self isn't overly surprising given the change in roster but he is visually making more mistakes then he was a few years ago which is worrying.
At a certain point we need to stop using vlads good 35ish games in the ahl from discounting the fact that Wolf already has over 110 good ahl games and he is getting to the point where the speed and skill of the ahl isn't enough to challenge him to grow and we need to give him a real run with nhl practices, games, and of course mistakes to take the next step.
For goalies, I think typically you want to ease prospects by giving them limited exposure a little bit at a time. Basically you put them in, let them see NHL speed and power for an hour or two and then give them a bird's eye view of what happened so that they can fine tune the identified issues in the AHL. What you don't want to do is let them drown in a manner where bad panic habits start to develop which end up taking over a passable talent.
We saw this with Dubnyk until Burke fixed him in Arizon, we saw it with Rittich (not fixed), Markstrom's career went that direction till Clark and I'm wondering if there's some of this going on with Vladar right now.
You can override a goalie's talent into a complete mess. Look at what's going on with Campbell right now. Dude is getting wrecked even at the AHL level. His save percentage in the AHL is worse than the NHL. We had a front row seat for a roller coaster goalie grave yard for almost a decade. Did people forget that already? We don't want that to happen with our goalies.
Wolf is talented, but he can get messed up. Look no further than what's going on with Levi in Buffalo right now. Saros was 21 when he got 21 games. Age 22 he got 26, but he still did play games in the AHL for that season. And this is a scenario where his development wasn't affected by pandemic related shut downs and restrictions. I posited in a different post that all goalies of Wolf's developmental arc/age are possibly 12-18 months behind a normal goalie developed to around age 23-24 prior to the pandemic.
Levi and Wolf are age 21 and 22 right now, but if comparing to the environment and scenario that Saros had, it's possible that Levi and Wolf are closer to Saro's age 19 and 20 development arc right now. It's OK to ease them in IMO.
Wolf didn't win that game. I'd give him a few week to work on a few things in the AHL, then bring him up again probably to get a bird's eye view for a game or two, then see if he can string a few wins in a row without bad habits. I'd send him down if he loses two in a row or has a bad showing, give him a few weeks then bring him up again.
