First I want to say I'm totally on board the Murray is our future, good luck in your future endeavors Fleury, train.
That said. I firmly believe Fleury at the top of his game is better then Murray at the top of his game. I think this will change, but if Fleury had not been concussed and found his footing against the Rangers I think we would have had the same result. (a stanley cup). The thing that concerns me with Fleury was that after the game 5 vs Tampa loss, he was totally beating himself up and blaming the whole game on himself. Calling the high blocker side goal "Stupid". I think this was a unique pressure situation, Fleury knew he was rusty, he also knew that it was his only shot to remain a Pittsburgh Penguin next season. (no pressure though) Also this was one of the few games where the Penguins did not dominate the game.
Looking at Murray, he gave up 4 "Stupid" goals in the same spot over the course of the playoffs. 3 of them where markedly worse. BUT Murray comes away from almost single handedly losing game 3 (and game 5) against the Sharks and tells reporters that he had a good game, made some good saves, etc.
Thing is that sort of almost delusional self-confidence can serve a goalie really well.
Murray's glove hand is beyond bad, he got beat between his arm and body several times. Hell he gave up a bad 5 hole goal in game 6 (fleury never gives that up). BUT once again the big thing is he shrugs it off, he still believes in himself.
I do think Fleury has psychologically come a long way from the days of the islander series where by all accounts he was literally banging his head on a concrete wall and almost inconsolable.
But lets get real here, this might be the most dominant run to a stanley cup I've seen from any team in the last 8+ years. The final scores, series stats might not show it, but we utterly dominated play in almost every series, in almost every game. Caps where the only team that where close to us. The other teams really couldn't skate with us and where completely flat footed. So just saying, we can't compare Murray's run, (in which he dipped quite significantly prior to Fleury getting a start, i.e. 88% save pct in a 5 game stretch), should be eye'd with this in mind.
Fleury has stolen games for us in the playoffs, big games. Murray could be argued that he stole one against the Caps, otherwise he was outplayed by every single goalie he was up against. Fleury never in his career had a team in front of him that dominated like this.
Sorry long post, I do really think that once Murray gets his glove hand sorted out, stops leaning so far forward when he goes down (watch how upright vasiliskey is when he is down in the butterfly and moving down for comparison) that he is gonna be a wall for us. He also needs to fight to see the puck through screens better.
BUT I think that Murray's demeanor in net is huge. It's a weird dynamic but you can have a confident goalie who is playing worse actually influence the team to play better then a better goalie who starts blaming himself...
Also all the things that I listed about Murray are very fixable.
Life isn't fair, neither is pro sports. No concussions we aren't even talking about this. But they happened, buh-bye Marc Andre...