His GSAx is bottom third in the league. Then again, so is Gus. Both were above average last year. Wild have Brodin and Faber but not much else on that blueline. How much of this is team driven and how much of it is Flower is just old and at the cliff’s edge (and Gus maybe being a one-hit wonder)?
Does Fleury really have enough left in the tank to be “the man” for a true contender or would an acquiring team simply be hoping against hope to catch lightning in a bottle for one last crack at the apple?
Edit: Interesting...if you break down Flower's situational GSAx this year, he's still well above average during 5v5 play. He just gets absolutely massacred when the team is short-handed, like bottom 5 in the NHL bad. Gus is the opposite...above average results (top 10 in the league) when the team is short-handed but quite literally the worst starting goalie in the league this year in even-strength GSAx. It's really interesting that this is all occurring on the same team, behind the same defense.
The PK was all time record breaking bad levels for the first month, key injuries to our best defensive players, other guys playing through injuries just to ice a roster, and frankly just bad puck luck contributed to that.
Fleury has been good this year IMO and I am not much of a fan generally, he has been steadier than he was each of the two previous seasons, though he had good stretches there too. It’s a tale of two coins for the Wild, we have 2 high caliber defensive D men, whatever Middleton is, and then 3-4 guys that do not even belong in the league they are so bad. Mermis, Merrill and Goligoski have an extremely outsized impact on the goals against this year, some atrocious stuff out of that group makes the numbers go all over the board.
He is better than Talbot, I can pretty definitively say that, but I still wouldn’t really trust him to carry a series. He would be acquired as a backup, and MN would only sell when they are fully out of it, which frankly seems unlikely to resolve soon.
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