Valid points. There are goalies that get absolutely shelled and are still capable of making the saves that should be made. Nobody’s faulting Grubauer or Jones for goals on which they had no chance. The problem is that they give up too many goals on shots NHL goalies are expected to stop.
Is it the Kraken’s only weakness? Of course not. As you guys have pointed out, special teams have been atrocious.
I just firmly believe, and know from experience, that if the other guy in net stops the shots he’s expected to and our guy doesn’t, all the highlight reel desperation saves don’t mean anything. We lose. That’s what save percentage is, a sometimes flawed but accepted metric of how a goalie performs. A better measuring stick is goals saved above expected. That’s where having a Sorokin, Shesterkin, Vasy, Hellebuyck, or Ullmark elevates a team. The Kraken don’t have a guy like that, and yeah, not many teams do.
So what’s the solution? Draft and develop and wait four years? Trade a pick or prospect for the untapped potential of somebody backing up elsewhere? Nobody (I hope) is advocating changing the goalies just to change the goalies, but the players need to trust each other, from the net on out to the 7th defenseman and the 13th forward.
I don’t know. I just know, as a goalie myself, that the team in front of you HAS TO believe you’ll stop the stoppable ones, and I don’t know if Gru and Jones still elicit that faith.
Maybe, as a former Canucks fan, I’m clouded by PTSD. the Canucks had ample firepower during the West Coast Express days but went nowhere because Dan Cloutier was completely unreliable and that whole team knew it.
The Kraken have needs elsewhere, definitely, but it won’t matter how strong a lineup they build in the next few years of goaltending holds them back.
