Another good effort, another poor performance by our 'star' goaltender. The Canucks have played well as a team, they just need some consistency in net. Last year Demko started really slowly and this year it has been the same. Similarly, the Canucks have reverted (albeit less so) to trying to be a more "defensive-minded" team. Know your personnel. Their key defensive pieces: Demko, Hughes, Myers (and Rathbone) are all much better in open, end-to-end play than when tasked with structured defense.
Here is something I posted at the start of last year when the Canucks were off to a similar slow start, especially with special teams, that I think still applies today.
"[Demko] has been a middling goalie this year in terms of goals saved above expectations. Very good at ES, but very poor on the PK. I am tired of him being touted as a top goalie because of highlight reel saves when the underlying results just don't back it up. It is a classic Vancouver media dogpile both for Demko and anti the rest of the team.
No I am not saying he sucks overall, or that he has been costing the team games, just trying to bring everyone back to reality a little.
Demko, like Markstrom before him and DiPietro to come, is an athletic goaltender that thrives on persistence and instinctual saves and plays his best hockey when he is able to reign in the movement and settle his game. He is best suited for a run-and-gun style of play where he is involved in the game, faces lots of shots and typically overperforms when facing prototypical "high danger" chances, but fares far more poorly (to the point of being below average) on "low-danger" chances like point shots and shots with minimal pre-shot movement. Both he and Marky seemed to struggle with rebound control, often making dramatic saves, only to punt rebounds into the goal-front, then make another dramatic save again. Both Demko and Markstrom have had a penchant for making ridiculous saves and later giving up soft goals, often in the same game.
A goalie who is good against high danger plays will still concede mostly high danger goals since that is how most goals are scored (NST has it as 55%, or 6463/11854 since Demko has entered the league). He will just concede fewer than he should. Prior to this game, Demko had conceded 112 high danger goals out of 203 total since 2018, for 55%, so he is normal in terms of counts there.
Vancouver gives up lots of high danger opportunities against and Demko saves more than his share. The stats bear that out, his HDGSAA is +5.96 in that time (18th for GP>20) and he ranks as one of the better goalies in the league in goals saved above expected over the last three seasons. Thing is, his LDGSAA is a paltry -0.92 and 43rd in that time. These aren't earth-shattering differences, but given the hypothesis that he is a good goaltender in general, one would expect his low danger goaltending to be just as strong as his high and medium (where he truly shines at +11.07) danger goaltending, which it just isn't. He has shown an improvement in all facets of his game over time, yet his LDGSAA numbers still lag far behind his strong play against high danger chances (he sits 64th at -1.59 all situations).
I think it likely a combination of athleticism over poise, Clark's coaching techniques and the Canucks style of play that lead to that.
It is one thing to have great GSAx numbers based on saving all the difficult shots, but it seems more valuable to have a less athletic, but more consistent goaltender who makes the easy saves and gives up fewer rebounds and therefore does not artificially inflate their own GSAx.
Also, if the Canucks have recognized that their goaltender is elite at making saves off of odd man rushes and those sorts of "high danger" chances, it absolutely behooves them to really open up play, forecheck aggressively and try to trade chances, especially if they figure that the opposing netminder is better suited to in-zone defense. Not doing this has been one of Green's biggest coaching failings this season.
For the record, I think the Canucks' management has absolutely targeted players that fit that style of play. Tyler Myers is not good if you want low-event, safe hockey, but great if you hope to trade chances and create off the rush since he excels in neutral zone lateral puck movement and at facilitating controlled entries on offense. The tradeoff is that he is poor defensively off the rush as well as in-zone, but I would imagine that their analytics team liked him for his rush-offense profile enough to gamble on him anyway.
In short:
He is a frustrating player to watch, because he clearly has the potential to be a great (and maybe Vezina calibre) goalie, but is not doing the easy stuff as well as a player with his talents should. Like Markstrom, who has cut out some of the inconsistencies from his game, so too may Demko evolve and become more poised in the future, and like his former mentor, legitimately deserve to be in Vezina contention."
