He hasn't been a problem but he hasn't been the solution either. Even Halak managed to clench out an ECF for his team once. Holtby hasn't taken an otherwise outplayed team to the ECF like Hank and numerous other goalies have, which is the only real argument for him being untouchable.
He put up a 2.28/92.3% in the Pens series. That's pretty much exactly on par with his Vezina-winning season (2.20/92.2%). And that's with the team playing pretty poorly in front of him in that series.
"Good in the playoffs but not amazing..."? "Outplayed by Murray..."? You must've bumped your head. Our offense cratered way before the playoffs even began, and that trend continued in the postseason. So was Murray a world-beater, or were we struggling versus EVERYONE offensively? Watch those games back and tell me we were creating quality chances that Murray stood on his head to save. No, what you'll see is an offense that pretty routinely failed to get ANYTHING going. Murray just reaped the benefits of that, and so did Neuvirth.
You don't have to "downgrade" anything to free up cap space. Orpik, Winnik, and Eller have a collective $10.225m cap hit. You wouldn't maybe want to cut there first, before trading away your best player? One that's signed to a pretty team-friendly contract, by the way...
There are far, FAR better ways to make cap room. Those 3 guys are examples of players whose value to the team can be replaced for far less dollars, without taking a sizable performance hit. Williams' hit is coming off the books entirely unless he wants to stay for peanuts. The expansion draft is going to relieve us of someone. Those are 5 options off the top of my head that could easily yield the space we need to maintain.
Trading Holtby? Why? Because Grubauer has played well this year? This is a guy that somehow managed to put up a losing record with a Presidents' Trophy team last year, despite getting pretty uniformly favorable starts. His actual numbers were fine, but if you want to talk about a goalie that can win you clutch games in the playoffs, look no further than the keeper with exactly 1 playoff game under his belt that gave up 3 on 21 shots (85.7%), right?
It takes more than a 6-game sample playing mostly against whichever is the lesser opponent in back-to-backs to prove that you're ready to fully replace a guy who just won the Vezina and has ridiculously bonkers postseason numbers.
I'm thrilled with the way Grubauer has played this year, but those numbers are still in favorable starts for a team that's been strong defensively and among the league's best in shots-against.
C'mon, you cannot do this. We're not in a video game. I understand the logic, but it's waaaaaaaaaay to risky.
