His stats were ****?
How did you arrive at the conclusion?
The season prior to Khabibulin's arrival the Hawks went 20-40-11-8. He was signing with an absolute bottom feeder.
His first season he posts a 3.35 GAA and an .886 save percentage.
The following year, he puts up a 2.86 GAA and a .902 save percentage. This is **** to you?
The year after that, he improves even more with a 2.63 goals against average and a .909 save percentage and the Hawks have their first winning season in six years. This is **** to you?
The fourth and final year of that contract he improves yet again, with a 2.33 goals against average, a .919 save percentage.
Strangely you claim he didn't carry a number one's work load in this season despite that fact that he played the most games of any goaltender on the roster, so that seems like an odd thing to say. Then, as the starter in the playoffs, he leads the club to Western Conference Final.
I don't think using the Hawks prior season is fair in measuring Khabibulins tenure...
Goaltending was arguably one of the main reasons that 03-04 season made them such an "absolute bottom feeder" prior to Khabibulins arrival... They had made the playoffs in 02. Then for 03, they were the best team to not make the playoffs.
They had a good start to 03-04, then lost Jocelyn Thibault (who had better stats in 03 than Khabibulin did in his first 3 seasons in Chicago) a month into the season. They then went with a revolving door consisting of a 21-22YO trio of Michael Leighton, Craig Anderson and Adam Munro, and fringe veteran Steve Passmore for the almost 5 months that Thibault was out. After Thibault went down, they won 1 of their next 20 games, before finishing the season with 20 wins overall.
IMO, part of what shades Khabibulins 1st trip in Chicago was expectations. IIRC, they signed him to the biggest contract in their history at the time, and he was supposed to stabilize the goaltending position after it was the previously mentioned revolving door the season before and inconsistent with Thibault after they traded away Jeff Hackett.
If his record stank and/or his GAA was high, you could blame it on being on a bottom feeder. However, we've seen goalies at Khabibulin's advertised (at the time) caliber post pretty solid SV% numbers on bottom feeding teams. Ryan Millers last year in Buffalo comes to mind, Price, Nabokov, Dubnyk and even Khabibulin himself in Edmonton, etc. etc.
Even after Khabibulin improved enough to give them that first winning season in 6 years, the Hawks must've agreed that there was something "fecal" about his play or numbers as they decided to hand big money to Cristobal Huet and then leave Khabibulin's last year free to every other team via waivers.