Penaltykiller17
Registered User
Maybe, maybe not. Posted it in another thread, but in half the games last year, we scored 2 or less goals. Which meant the goaltender in net (whoever that was) would have needed to only allow 1 or less to get a win. That's a much higher demand than league average.
Darling will hopefully give us more of those 1 or less games than Ward/Lack did, but I don't think "league average goaltending" will be the difference, assuming we don't make any other major moves.
League average goaltending also includes a save percentage greater than .909. We needed what we got, and we got it. Every goaltender set to hit the market (Darling, Grubauer, Bishop, Fleury) comes with some kind of question mark, so there may not have been a definitive answer in net, but we couldn't go into next season with the same two people for the 3rd straight year and expect different results.