Is it too early for Mike Smith to be serving up a ton of crow?

[GodPucker]

I would say guys like me are eating crow on a small sample size.

Cgy would be in the dumps without him. Good for him. Lets see how long he can do it.

 

[madmike77]

He looked very human last night. But the Flames goal-scoring luck finally began to turn, so it didn't kill the team.

 

[TheLegend]

Smith has a .945 Save % in the playoffs so Flames are in good hands if they do make it.

Smith wasnt really that good until he went to Arizona. Thank Dave Tippett, the goalie whisperer.

No..... that credit goes to Sean Burke. Who also turned Devon Dubnyk's career around.

Average goalies don't get selected for the Olympic team, even as backups.

And he never played one minute in the last Olympic tournament.


Smith was an enigma in Arizona.... some nights he stood on his head and kept the team in it, and other times couldn't stop a beach ball (or even once with the seat of his pants ). But he did play for a time with a chronic core muscle injury and that affected his performance some. Extremely competitive.... but if his own teammates made too many mistakes in his mind he's start staring them down.

 

[OvermanKingGainer]

One thing I have noticed is that Smith is really good at bailing guys out. It's one thing to make the saves you should make, but it's another to make robberies after a guy coughd up the puck at the blue line leading to a breakaway. From a psychological perspective it gives guys confidence to be creative and focus on transition offense and varied breakouts. The results are not quite there yet as the Flames have been out of sync this year (and way too much Matt Bartkowski) but you can see it building. The three players who are most thriving right now are TJ brodie, Johnny Gaudreau, and Micheal Ferland.

The last time we had a goalie play like this was 2014-15 Jonas Hiller who made the Russell - Wideman pair look good. That was also the last time we won a playoff series. Hiller fell off the map the next year and was never the puck handler that Smith is, but he definitely had a knack for making timely, unlikely saves.

 

[HugginThePost]

I don't hate him, but I do hate bad arguments. "Average goalies don't make the Olympic roster" is a bad argument, because Fleury and Smith both stand as obvious counterexamples.

Then you should hate the post I responded to, the one where he said Mike Smith was an awful goalie.

I believe we are on the same page, but it also seems as though he may have taken your lunch money at some pint in time.

 

[blankall]

He looked very human last night. But the Flames goal-scoring luck finally began to turn, so it didn't kill the team.

He gave up a couple bad rebounds but also made some huge saves too. The fact that his bad goals came from rebound control and not just letting in softies is a big step up from Elliott.

Even those rebond goals weren't entirely on Smith. They all involved wide open wingers.