Blues Goaltending

[TruBlu]

He has been the least of our problems recently, but we should still dump him the moment the opportunity presents itself. He's had over 2 years now and he has shown us who he is.

Hopefully his current level of play continues long enough to get some GM to want to take the risk without us needing to take back a bad contract.

I don't see anyone I'd take right now, and I doubt with our cap situation that we'd even be able to make a trade. His contract cost isn't bad at all for a starter. I don't see any changes being made until the offseason.

 

[Alklha]

I don't see anyone I'd take right now, and I doubt with our cap situation that we'd even be able to make a trade. His contract cost isn't bad at all for a starter. I don't see any changes being made until the offseason.

We probably won't see a move until the offseason, it still needs to be done.

The fact his contract isn't bad for a starter is entirely meaningless when he isn't good enough to be a reliable starter. He has never proven he has been a starter at this level.

If the opportunity to dump that contract presented itself, without taking back a bad contract in return, then we should jump all over it and worry about who our starter is afterwards.

 

[TruBlu]

We probably won't see a move until the offseason, it still needs to be done.

The fact his contract isn't bad for a starter is entirely meaningless when he isn't good enough to be a reliable starter. He has never proven he has been a starter at this level.

If the opportunity to dump that contract presented itself, without taking back a bad contract in return, then we should jump all over it and worry about who our starter is afterwards.

I was bringing up the contract because I don't think you'll find a better starter that has a comparable sized contract. With us being up against the cap it pretty much makes it impossible for a trade.

 

[Majorityof1]

I was bringing up the contract because I don't think you'll find a better starter that has a comparable sized contract. With us being up against the cap it pretty much makes it impossible for a trade.

Seriously? Vasielesky, Dubnyk, Raanta, Bishop, Elliott, Hutton, F Anderson, Halak, Gibson..... All better, all $5M or less. Most make less than Jake. Some are RFA deals, but so was Jake's. And a lot of those aren't. There are only 5 goalies in the league who have a cap hit $2M or more higher than Jake. $4.35M is not a great contract. It puts him top 20 highest paid goalies. He is not a top 20 goalie by any other definition

 

[TruBlu]

Seriously? Vasielesky, Dubnyk, Raanta, Bishop, Elliott, Hutton, F Anderson, Halak, Gibson..... All better, all $5M or less. Most make less than Jake. Some are RFA deals, but so was Jake's. And a lot of those aren't. There are only 5 goalies in the league who have a cap hit $2M or more higher than Jake. $4.35M is not a great contract. It puts him top 20 highest paid goalies. He is not a top 20 goalie by any other definition

Who of those guys that you listed are actually obtainable that you'd even want? Even someone whose contract is 100k more than Jakes requires salary to be retained by the selling team.

 

[Majorityof1]

Who of those guys that you listed are actually obtainable that you'd even want? Even someone whose contract is 100k more than Jakes requires salary to be retained by the selling team.

Ah. I misunderstood. I thought you were arguing that Allen is a good deal, because there is no goalie (available or not) better at his salary. That is why I thought you were nuts, but I guess you are saying we couldn't find an improvement available for trade at his salary.

There may not be a goalie available at his salary, but I don't think there are many goalies available period, at least not for a price we are willing to pay. The extra salary is moot. We can ship Gunnarsson out when he comes off of IR and have enough for almost any goalie in the league to replace Jake. $4.35M + 2.9M = $7.25M which is enough for any goalie in the league except Price, Lundqvist or Bobrovsky. I'm sure the Jackets would retain a $200k on Bob if that was the difference between a deal and no deal, so really only Price or Lundqvist are too much and neither is coming here. The question is not salary, but can we find a team to take Allen and can we get a good enough deal on a replacement.

 

[Stupendous Yappi]

UFA Bobrovsky is starting to look like the most realistic option for an upgrade, and that would be expensive: probably having to sweeten Allen's deal in a trade, and parting with enough salary cap space to fit Bob.

 

[CaliforniaBlues310]

UFA Bobrovsky is starting to look like the most realistic option for an upgrade, and that would be expensive: probably having to sweeten Allen's deal in a trade, and parting with enough salary cap space to fit Bob.

The cap is going up to $83 million, so we’ll have over 20 mil in cap space at the end of the season. If we trade Jake, we’ll be able to fit him in.

 

[LetsGoBooze]

Career stats of a player many consider a top 5 Goalie of all time: GAA 2.54 SV% .910
Career stats of a player many consider the biggest problem on the Blues: GAA 2.53 SV% .911

Hmmmmm.

Patrick Roy vs Jake Allen.

Perspective.

 

[PiggySmalls]

Career stats of a player many consider a top 5 Goalie of all time: GAA 2.54 SV% .910
Career stats of a player many consider the biggest problem on the Blues: GAA 2.53 SV% .911

Hmmmmm.

Patrick Roy vs Jake Allen.

Perspective.

One has won 3 cups, 3 Conn Smythes, 5 Jennings, 3 Vezina awards. Plus he modernized the butterfly position. I’ll let you guess which goalie in your comparison I’m talking about.

If you want perspective, don’t compare a goalie that played in 1,000+ regular season games vs. 240 in Allen.

 

[EastonBlues22]

Career stats of a player many consider a top 5 Goalie of all time: GAA 2.54 SV% .910
Career stats of a player many consider the biggest problem on the Blues: GAA 2.53 SV% .911

Hmmmmm.

Patrick Roy vs Jake Allen.

Perspective.

Roy played during an era when he had the top save percentage in the league (four times) with the following numbers: .900, .908, .912, .914

He also led the league with GAAs of 2.47 and 2.36 during the same era. When goaltender's numbers improved significantly, he led later the league with a GAA of 1.94 at the age of 36.

Go to Roy's and Allen's hockey reference pages and check out the Goals Saved Above Average (GSAA) column. Roy never had a negative year, was rarely under 15 goals better than average, and peaked around 47(!) goals better than average with a career total of approximately 446(!) goals above average.

Allen's best year to date is 6 goals above average, with a career total of about 11 goals below average prior to this game.

Perspective, indeed.

It's absolutely silly to pretend these two goalies are equivalent in any way whatsoever.

 

[LetsGoBooze]

It's absolutely silly to pretend these two goalies are equivalent in any way whatsoever.

Brodeur had a .912 save percentage as well.

I'm not stating that Allen is equivalent, i'm showing that even the best goalies in the world get scored on. And if you take their careers as a whole the factual statistical GAA and SV% numbers are similar to Jake's. Sure, Jake is upgradeable, but in my opinion another 30-40 goal scorer would do more for this team than say upgrading Allen to Price or whatever name anyone wants to throw out there.

 

[EastonBlues22]

Brodeur had a .912 save percentage as well.

I'm not stating that Allen is equivalent, i'm showing that even the best goalies in the world get scored on. And if you take their careers as a whole the factual statistical GAA and SV% numbers are similar to Jake's. Sure, Jake is upgradeable, but in my opinion another 30-40 goal scorer would do more for this team than say upgrading Allen to Price or whatever name anyone wants to throw out there.

It's not the raw numbers that were impressive, it's how those numbers stacked up to their peers at the time.

You could be right that adding a 30-40 goal scorer would be a bigger upgrade than replacing Allen. That's a pretty huge upgrade. I'd argue that upgrading Allen is the lower hanging fruit, though, as long as you're not gunning for someone exorbitantly expensive. There's a lot of room between Allen and best goaltender in the league. It shouldn't be that hard to find someone capable of doing better.

I'm not interested in scapegoating Allen for all the team's troubles. There are clearly other issues here as well, especially this season. I just think that his contributions to the team's struggles the past couple of years have been one of the easiest to diagnose, and should (theoretically) be one of the easiest to address. The rest of this mess isn't quite as easy to suss out.

 

[LetsGoBooze]

Career:
Rinne .919
Price .918
Allen .912

What's that equate to 1 less goal every 4-5 games? And if we tried for a marginal upgrade to lets say a .915 Goalie, that's even less at say 1 less goal every 8-10 games. I think more scoring would do more than a marginal upgrade in Goal for this team, especially considering last time we tried to upgrade to Miller mid-season, we all saw how that played out.

 

[TruBlu]

Jake will be another name in a long list of goaltenders who gets moved out simply to replace him with "the next guy."

 

[EastonBlues22]

Career:
Rinne .919
Price .918
Allen .912

What's that equate to 1 less goal every 4-5 games? And if we tried for a marginal upgrade to lets say a .915 Goalie, that's even less at say 1 less goal every 8-10 games. I think more scoring would do more than a marginal upgrade in Goal for this team, especially considering last time we tried to upgrade to Miller mid-season, we all saw how that played out.

Goals Saved Above Average stats essentially do this very thing. The compare a goalie's save percentage for certain shot types against league average for the same shot types, and then determine how many more or less goals the goalie saves than the "average" goalie given the types and totals of shots faced.

Last year Allen was 10 goals below average. The top goalie in the league was at +27 GSAA, a top 5 goalies was around +20 GSAA, and the 15th best starter was around +10 GSAA. That means Allen was about 20-35 goals worse than the starting goalies on most other playoff caliber teams.

Last year 20 additional goals against was the difference between having a top 5 defense and a top 15 defense, or a top 15 defense and top 25 defense. That's a significant difference, clearly, even if it's "only" one goal every four games in the grand scheme of things.

Put another way, the difference between the #1 PP and the #20 PP was about 20 goals scored last year. It's a parity league. An extra goal every four games makes a big difference when not that much separates most of the league. Every little bit of extra performance you can scrounge up matters.

 

[LetsGoBooze]

Goals Saved Above Average stats essentially do this very thing. The compare a goalie's save percentage for certain shot types against league average for the same shot types, and then determine how many more or less goals the goalie saves than the "average" goalie given the types and totals of shots faced.

Last year Allen was 10 goals below average. The top goalie in the league was at +27 GSAA, a top 5 goalies was around +20 GSAA, and the 15th best starter was around +10 GSAA. That means Allen was about 20-35 goals worse than the starting goalies on most other playoff caliber teams.

Last year 20 additional goals against was the difference between having a top 5 defense and a top 15 defense, or a top 15 defense and top 25 defense. That's a significant difference, clearly, even if it's "only" one goal every four games in the grand scheme of things.

Put another way, the difference between the #1 PP and the #20 PP was about 20 goals scored last year. It's a parity league. An extra goal every four games makes a big difference when not that much separates most of the league. Every little bit of extra performance you can scrounge up matters.

Last year was Jake's worst season by far, why are you using the outlier year instead of his career totals? If i had to guess he's going to come back pretty average over his career, and plenty of championships have been won with average goalies.

 

[EastonBlues22]

Last year was Jake's worst season by far, why are you using the outlier year instead of his career totals? If i had to guess he's going to come back pretty average over his career, and plenty of championships have been won with average goalies.

I just used last year because it was the last full year he's had. It was an illustrative example. I wasn't using it in a predictive sense to say that he's going to be _____ bad moving forward.

When people talking about being able to win with average goalies, they usually mean a league average starter, or about the 15th best starter in the league. That's a far different thing than a league average goalie, which factors in the play of backups, injury call-ups, emergency goalies, etc. A top 15 goalie in the league (on average) will have his ups and downs, and his up years are generally good enough to win it all. It varies from year to year, but last year an average starter was about 10 goals better than a league average goalie.

Allen's very peak as a goalie was in 2015-16 when he finished 14th in GSAA at 6.28. His other full years he finished 38th, 26th, and 61st. This year he was 51st coming into tonight's game. I don't think anyone would consider Allen to be a league average starter based on his body of work to date. He hasn't even been league average.

 

[TruBlu]

I'd like to move on from Jake, simply so we can hate on the next goaltender. He's going to find success somewhere, definitely not here. My only worry is that we will get a team together that is cup-worthy and he'll stand on his head against us in the first round.

 

[Evocable Manager]

I'd like to move on from Jake, simply so we can hate on the next goaltender. He's going to find success somewhere, definitely not here. My only worry is that we will get a team together that is cup-worthy and he'll stand on his head against us in the first round.

Easton had made several posts proving how awful he is.

His raw numbers are inflated by being behind a good team. You break it down and he's below league average.

So why would he all of a sudden become successful behind a different team? None of the best teams are in search for a goalie.

 

[Colt55]

Blues place goaltender Chad Johnson on waivers

 

[PiggySmalls]

I find it really interesting, that Berube won’t name his starter for tomorrow. I get not “tipping your hand” but when he hasn’t decided between a rookie and Allen, sure leaves the door up to speculation.

 

[Brian39]

Blues place goaltender Chad Johnson on waivers

Best news I've heard all day.

Johnson wasn't good enough here and Binny has been outplaying Husso. We've past my point of "the playoffs are a possibility" so I'm thrilled to see what we have in our elder goalie prospect. Let's get him some games and better inform our decision on him this summer.

 

[Colt55]

Yeah i am looking forward to seeing the kid play. Cause at this point the blues are either a dumpster fire or a really good team. there seems to be no inbetween.

 

[DudeLebowski]

It’s unfortunate that Husso has played poorly/on a team that has played poorly.

But JB has logged over 160 games for us in the AHL so, he is due. Excited to see what he’s got!