We've been down this road before, DB. But to clarify for our new readers who didn't have the fortune to see us slapbox each other in the Top 40 goalie thread haha, it's not unorthodox that I don't like. I had the biggest Dominik Hasek poster on my bedroom wall, I'm a big fan. It's the sustainability that I want. I want a player to be reliable. Thomas not only wasn't reliable, but he proved he wasn't. He couldn't hack in the league for 10 years.
He came up, had his couple of seasons and washed away...
NHL career without Julien: 63-67-18, 2.96 GAA, .908 save pct., 4 SO
NHL career with Julien: 180-99-31, 2.24 GAA, .927 save pct., 33 SO
He desperately needed those cushy confines to pretend to be NHL caliber...on either side of that, three goals per game...not good enough. I'm not trying to vacate those wins or get him to pawn off his ring. He won it fair and square. The idea is that comparisons to Hasek or Martin St. Louis, oddly enough, are just not jiving with reality. A fair comparison is Cechmanek, big in the regular season, just wasn't gifted a HOF shutdown d-man, HOF caliber shutdown center, a coach who inflates save pct. in every spot and 62 (!) even strength goals in a playoff...that's the meat of it. Just flip the script...Cechmanek got exactly two goals of run support from his first place team in 2002. Thomas got twenty million in 2011. Cechmanek is laughed at and was laughed out of the league. Thomas has this weird hero fetishism associated with him and is on an otherwise-very-respectable top-40 goalie list...and I know I'm playing a whale of a what-if card here, one guy did it and one guy didn't...I got it. The idea is that when you have such a limited scope to work with because of the player's own inabilities and weaknesses, you really slice it awfully close with other flashes...I mean, I see some talk here about Timmeh being a HOFer...that's absolutely bananaland...
If it was more along the lines of "hey remember that time that minor league scrub Michael Leighton played in a Stanley Cup Final? Or that time (times?) that really annoyingly bad goalie Brian Elliott led the ******* planet in save pct. or whatever? Yeah, that was funny...heh heh" I wouldn't care...but all these "all time" type terms get thrown around in this case and it's really off-putting...something of a slap to actual all time efforts and players...