Full stand-up? Or had strong elements of stand-up...? I'm suspecting the former, but if the latter, that Warren Strelow/Vlad Tretiak school gets a lot of love: Brodeur, Nabokov, Richter, etc.
My immediate reaction is to say Martin Brodeur. But I guess it depends how you want to define "standup".
Id say the style tipping point IMO is does the goalie in question make kick saves and/or pad stacks as part of their regular save repertoire. So a goaltender like Tim Thomas who recovers to his feet a lot relative to his peers but still makes most of his saves using the butterfly and similar techniques is *not* a standup goaltender, but early career Marty Brodeur might be. (I dont recall much of his later career well, but he was still using some desperation moves that had more in common with pad stacks and the Hasek roll than anything that butterfly goaltenders are taught to do these days)
M.A. Fleury from youth hockey days was first and foremost a reflex goalie, teasing shooters to try his glove side.
Martin Brodeur from youth hockey days was a stand-up goalie, relying on positioning and his size to cover the net.
Ok, so that's very agreeable...
I don't think anyone intended to mention Fleury (just the OP did) in terms of stand-up style...but just in terms of the playoff run that he went on...I don't think anyone could ever construe Flower as being a stand-up goalie...I thought you were saying that with regard to my list of kind of hybrid goalies with stand-up foundations...but, yes, Fleury is a reflex goalie/butterfly-plus-plus and need not apply to this thread certainly...
Ok, clarifying, I was not referring to Fleury as a standup goaltender at all, I was referring to his playoffs this past season as a comparable for a truly elite playoffs (he had what, a f***ing 940 sv pct going into the finals at one point this past playoffs?), which I would consider somewhat similar to Ranfords 1990 playoffs.
And for the record, Brodeurs evolution was the reverse of that. He started out as a butterfly centric goaltender in junior, but had his style broken down and
rebuilt with a lot of standup/older thinking by Jacques Caron when he arrived in the NHL.
I would say McLean since he was an NHL goaltender one season longer than Ranford (my definition of "elite" is "playing at the NHL level", and I understand that others may have a different valid definition of that term.)
I would call Brodeur a hybrid goaltender, although some call McLean an "inverted V" Ian Young style goaltender (McLean probably doesn't refer to himself as a pure standup goaltender).
Can you clarify exactlty what the inverted V was supposed to be? Ive heard that term a few times before, but I have no idea what they thought it meant. McLean always appeared to be a truly classic standup goaltender to me, everything about the way he approached making saves was distinctly at right angles with butterfly style thinking.
And yeah, its hard to say which one of Ranford v McLean really was better, but Id rate Ranfords peak in the 90 & 92 playoffs as giving him the edge IMO. I might just not be seeing enough footage of prime Ranford to see similar issues in his game, but every time I see footage of McLean from that 1994 playoff year he leaves me wanting a little bit more, and McLeans low points could be downright awful.