Worst #1 goalie ever?

[pnep]

Frank Brophy

Howie "Holes" Lockhart

Ken "Tubby" McAuley

Hardy "The Swedish Sieve" Astrom

Peter McDuffe

Pierre "Lucky Pierre" Hamel

Don "Deke" Head

 

[tp71]

I know he wasnt the starting goaltender, but if he was, it would be Michael Belhumeur. Holds the record for most games played without a win. Playing in 35 games, with 0-24-3 record with a 5.36 GAA. He went 0-5-1 the next season to finish off his Washington Capitals career at 0-29-4. Just wanted you all to soak that in.

 

[Stray Wasp]

I've got an old highlights video from circa 91 called "The Best of NHL". When it focuses on goalies there's plenty of attention paid to Roy, Fuhr, Hextall, Moog, Ranford and...Allan Bester. Maybe the producer was a Leafs fan.

 

[MS]

My vote goes to Peter Ing.

Outside of 1990-91, where he started 56 games for the Leafs, he played 17 NHL games for the rest of his career. Wasn't even a very good AHL goalie. Had one season as an AHL starter, the year before his season in Toronto, and posted a GAA near 4.00. After his season in the NHL, he was never more than an AHL backup again.

Statistically, there might be a few guys who are worse (generally by virtue of having played for an expansion team), but I can't think of a player with a worse resume or less proven at lower levels who got to start 50+ games in a season than Ing.

Certainly not Bester, who did have his moments in Toronto (played very well in 1983-84 after being called up from junior as a teenager), was a very good minor-league goalie, and had a nice little stint with Dallas at the end of his career. And he never played more than 43 games in a season. Not a very good goalie, but not the worst.

 

[tarheelhockey]

Had one season as an AHL starter, the year before his season in Toronto, and posted a GAA near 4.00.

I'm just sitting here trying to wrap my head around this. WTF were the Leafs thinking?

 

[htpwn]

Tosgoala. I don't have the time to throw up his numbers, seriously his numbers are so bad I would throw up.

I wouldn't consider him the worst goalie of all time but after the season he had, I believe he definitely deserves to be mentioned in this thread.

Here's the stats you didn't throw up:

GP: 26
W-L-T-OTL: 7-12-0-3
GAA: 3.66
SV%: .874
SO: 1

In comparison, Gustavsson's numbers:

GP: 42
W-L-T-OTL: 16-15-0-9
GAA: 2.87
SV%: .902
SO: 1

Like I said, not the worst starting goalie of all time but is definitely deserving of a mention after his performance this season. Certainly you would be able to make a case for Toskala being the worst starter in the past decade.

 

[Papadice]

Bester wasn't a horrible goalie, he was an average goalie on a horrible team. The defence in front of him consisted of guys like Chris Kotsopoulous and Bob McGill. No goalie could succeed there. Bester's biggest weakness was his size, but he did outperform other Leaf goalies during his time there.

I fully agree... Bester wasn't an elite goaltender by any means, but he was decent, with a HORRENDOUS team... That old Don Cherry quote about facing more rubber than a dead skunk on the Trans Canada highway... that was all about Bester, and very true...

Speaking of Cherry, if you ask him, he'd answer that Hardy Astrom was the worst of all time... lol

 

[Big Phil]

Speaking of Cherry, if you ask him, he'd answer that Hardy Astrom was the worst of all time... lol

Well, now that you mention it.................

 

[Dennis Bonvie]

Garrett is the colour commentator of Sportsnet Canuck games. At least once a game he mentions something about his all-star appearance. It even takes up half his bio in the Canucks media guide. Though if you only have one "achievment" in your career, you might as well bring it up every time somebody talks to/with/about you.

Garrett was the first team all-star goalie in the WHA in 76-77. He had the most losses and gave up the most goals in the league playing for the Baby Bulls of Birmingham. Terrible numbers but spectacular most nights out of necessity.

 

[Canadiens1958]

Don Head

Frank Brophy

Howie "Holes" Lockhart

Ken "Tubby" McAuley

Hardy "The Swedish Sieve" Astrom

Peter McDuffe

Pierre "Lucky Pierre" Hamel

Don "Deke" Head

Far from the worst. Played on probably the worst pre expansion Bruins NHL team yet managed two shutouts.

Also had a 5 - 1 record with Canada at the 1960 Winter Olympics including a win over the Soviets.

 

[SealsFan]

How about Bill Ranford? Maybe not the "worst" but for all the games he played, was he ever known as a clutch goalie or as a goalie who was carrying the team? In 17 seasons, only once did he have a save percentage of.900, and during his peak seasons he was consistently in the .880's, hardly placing him among the elites.

 

[Scott1980]

Steve Rudolph Buzinski poor play prevented him from making this list. Got into just 9 games. Would have been interesting to see what his numbers would have been like as a #1 goalie!

 

[Kyle McMahon]

How about Bill Ranford? Maybe not the "worst" but for all the games he played, was he ever known as a clutch goalie or as a goalie who was carrying the team? In 17 seasons, only once did he have a save percentage of.900, and during his peak seasons he was consistently in the .880's, hardly placing him among the elites.

Did you really just suggest a goalie with a Conn Smythe, all-star game appearance, and Canada Cup starting goaltender in a worst goaltender thread?

Ranford was only ever a starting goalie for three playoff runs, and he won the Conn Smythe in one of them. He also won a lengthy shootout at the World Championships to win Canada the gold in 1994. He was stellar for Canada in all of his international appearances. I'd say he could play reasonably well when the chips were down.

Ranford was decent goaltender that showed flashes of greatness now and then, but who was stuck on a lousy Oilers team for what should have been his prime years. You could make the argument that he's the least-accomplished player with a Conn Smythe (and that's not a bad thing to be known for), but suggesting him in this thread is fairly ridiculous.

 

[cupcrazyman]

Dave Reese Boston Bruins.His Last NHL Game.

 

[Claimed Off Waivers]

Just curious about this one... who was the least-effective #1 goalie of all time?

- #1 goalie meaning he started at least 50% of his team's games
- "Worst" meaning poor individual performance... not just W-L record.

Could it be Pat Jablonski? He barely qualified as a #1 for one season, but look at this stat line from the 92-93 Lightning:

43gp
8w-24L-4t
3.97 gaa
.874 sv%

Damn, that's a brutal stat.

 

[panorama01*]

I know there might be worse ones, but Allan Bester comes to mind. How in the world did this guy get work in the NHL? He had a career GAA of 4.01. And he was WORSE in the playoffs. Remember when he let in that goal from the blueline in overtime during the 1990 playoffs? And the Leafs kept this guy around for 7 years like a bad cold. In 1989-'90 he played 42 games and despite winning 20 of them he had a GAA of 4.49! This is a goalie who allowed 8 goals in the playoffs in a game - on home ice!

Daniel Berthiaume comes to mind as well. He never played on the worst teams to walk the earth yet his GAA was terrible. He was 2-17-1 on the '93 Senators and he played 25 games which makes you realize he was pulled often.

John Garrett? There must have been the flu going around the NHL because this guy actually played in the all-star game in 1983.

Ron Low? The less you talked about him the better.

Allan Bester was better in Toronto than was Ken Wregget, or any of the other goalies that guarded Toronto's goal during his time there. He came back for Dallas in 1996 and didn't do too badly.

 

[Nalyd Psycho]

Did you really just suggest a goalie with a Conn Smythe, all-star game appearance, and Canada Cup starting goaltender in a worst goaltender thread?

Ranford was only ever a starting goalie for three playoff runs, and he won the Conn Smythe in one of them. He also won a lengthy shootout at the World Championships to win Canada the gold in 1994. He was stellar for Canada in all of his international appearances. I'd say he could play reasonably well when the chips were down.

Ranford was decent goaltender that showed flashes of greatness now and then, but who was stuck on a lousy Oilers team for what should have been his prime years. You could make the argument that he's the least-accomplished player with a Conn Smythe (and that's not a bad thing to be known for), but suggesting him in this thread is fairly ridiculous.

Like Kirk McLean, he was one of the last of the stand up goalies. By '95 there was simply no way a stand-up goalie could compete.

 

[panorama01*]

Damn, that's a brutal stat.

Grant Fuhr in 1988-89, fresh off his Hart candidacy and Vezina Trophy year, had an .876 save percentage. He had I think an .881 save percentage when he won the Vezina.

Vancouver Canucks 1984-85 goaltending statistics

Rk Player Pos Ht Wt Age GP MIN W L T/OT GA GAA SA SV SV% SO
1 Richard Brodeur G 5-7 160 32 51 2930 16 27 6 228 4.67 1574 1346 .855 0
2 Frank Caprice G 5-9 150 22 28 1523 8 14 3 122 4.81 818 696 .851 0
3 John Garrett G 5-8 175 33 10 407 1 5 0 44 6.49 243 199 .819 0
Team Total 80 4860 25 46 9 394 4.86 2635 2241 .850 0

 

[panorama01*]

I'm just sitting here trying to wrap my head around this. WTF were the Leafs thinking?

He had better stats than Jeff Reese, the backup. Allan Bester meanwhile was relegated to the minors until a trade to Detroit late in the year after which Damian Rhodes was called up.

 

[Nalyd Psycho]

People forget that in the late 80's a .900 save% was HUGE! Now you'd get sent to the minors.

 

[seventieslord]

A lot of people have already said so, but Allan Bester was not a bad goalie:

I discussed recently how goalies are often evaluated based on a few memories. For some goalies it means they are forever remembered as winners. For others, it means that they are defined by one bad goal against. The latter group is often very underrated. For example, all our memories of ten years of league average save percentages and a previously stellar international career vanished in a flash as soon as that puck bounced in off of Tommy Salo's head.

Another example of this phenomenon is Allan Bester. Bester is remembered as a joke among many Toronto Maple Leafs fans. Take this quote off a Leaf blog, for example:

"Raycroft is the worst starting goalie I’ve seen play for the Leafs since Allan Bester. Remember him? He attempted suicide one night. No, really. He jumped in front of a bus! But it went between his legs." (Leaf Club)

This is of course a reference to the the overtime goal scored by Sergio Momesso in the 1990 playoffs at Maple Leaf Gardens. Momesso's shot beat Bester five-hole, a memory that Leaf fans will forever associate with the tiny (5'7, 155) netminder.

However, the numbers paint a very different picture of Allan Bester. According to the statistics, Bester outperformed his teammates in every league that he ever played in, and was easily the best goalie the Leafs had in the 1980s. Despite this, the Momesso goal was essentially the end of Bester's NHL career.

Bester broke into the league early as a 19 year old right out of junior, and had all of his NHL success in his early twenties. With fellow youngster Ken Wregget, Bester made up a promising goalie tandem for the Leafs in the mid-1980s. The 1988-89 season was probably the high point of Bester's career, as he finished in the top 10 in save percentage on a team that missed the playoffs. Bester was even named to Team Canada's world championship squad, although he was unable to participate because of injury.

In 1989-90 Bester had an off-year, and then he struggled in the playoffs. Everything started to unravel after that. He was displaced in the Leaf net in 1990-91 by rookie Peter Ing and then got traded to the Detroit Red Wings for a draft pick.

The Wings buried Bester in the AHL, but he played well in the minors. In 1992, the Adirondack Red Wings won the Calder Cup, and Bester was named playoff MVP. The next year he outplayed Chris Osgood, who was seen as Detroit's goalie of the future. Without an opportunity to move up in the Red Wings organization, Bester looked to catch on with one of the expansion teams. He was passed over in the expansion draft, but managed to catch on with the Anaheim Mighty Ducks as a free agent.

Unfortunately for Allan Bester, Anaheim had the best goaltending of any of the expansion teams, with the solid tandem of Guy Hebert and Ron Tugnutt. Bester was competing with Mikhail Shtalenkov for the #3 role in the organization, and despite similar IHL numbers the team decided to give the NHL opportunities to Shtalenkov. Bester continued to play in the IHL until he got one last cup of coffee at the NHL level as an injury replacement for the Dallas Stars in 1996. He acquitted himself well in a 10 game stint, but returned to the IHL where he remained until he retired in 1997-98 at the age of 33.

Having established the biography, let's look at the numbers. I compared Bester's numbers to his teammates for every season of his professional career, except when he only played a few games which would not be a representative sample.

Allan Bester solidly outplayed his teammates at the NHL level:

Bester: 4.00 GAA, .883 save %, .432 win %, 2.5 SO/70 GP
Others: 4.30 GAA, .869 save %, .370 win %, 0.5 SO/70 GP

Bester has a clear edge in every stat, including a large edge in shutouts. For goalies playing on bad teams, shutouts are often a fairly good indicator of dominance, since they aren't able to post the easy shutouts that goalies on winning teams often get. On the mid-'80s Leafs, the only way anybody was going to get a shutout was through an outstanding performance, and Bester had a very respectable 2.5 shutouts per 70 games played (I prefer to express shutout rates per 70 games because the per-game rates get pretty small). This was five times the rate of his teammates. The raw total was 7 shutouts in the equivalent of 178 full games, compared to his teammates' total of just 2 in 309.

Question to Maple Leaf fans of that era: Does one bad playoff goal make up for a winning percentage difference of .062 compared to Toronto's other goalies, the equivalent of a 5 extra wins over a full season?

In the AHL, Bester again outplayed his teammates:

Bester: .487 win %, 3.74 GAA, 1.4 SO/70 GP
Others: .456 win %, 4.05 GAA, 1.5 SO/70 GP

Bester's playing partners included Wregget, Tim Bernhardt, Rick St. Croix, Damian Rhodes, Scott King and Chris Osgood. Bester spent his prime age 27 and 28 years in the minors as a Red Wing, outplaying his teammates and being named the MVP of a Calder Cup winning team, yet only getting to play 31 minutes in the NHL.

One contributing factor to this was likely the overall improvement in league goaltending during the early- to mid-1990s. A new wave of goalies was entering the league, bringing with them the modern butterfly style and displacing many veterans who weren't able to keep up. Bester certainly wasn't the only goalie of his age that got caught up in a numbers game, but having said that he was still putting up numbers that were as good as or better than several young goalies who were headed for the NHL. It is possible that his declining performance in 1989-90 and 1990-91 showed that he no longer had the ability to compete at the NHL level, but his minor league performance suggests that it is also possible that he had an off-year and didn't get a chance to play his way back into form.

In the IHL, Bester was in his thirties but was still usually the best goalie on the team. Some of his partners were scrubs, but others were legit goalies (e.g. Shtalenkov, Essensa).

Bester: .630 win %, 3.22 GAA, 1.9 SO/70 GP
Others: .563 win %, 3.43 GAA, 1.6 SO/70 GP

Just as winning goalies shouldn't be judged based on one shining playoff run, losing goalies should not be judged based on one bad goal. Allan Bester was likely at least a league average goalie, and for a short time probably even better than that.

I'll leave you with one final stat: From 1983-84 to 1989-90, Allan Bester finished 13th in the NHL in save percentage among goalies with at least 150 GP, playing on one of the worst teams in the league. I'll post a section of the standings so we can see the goalies just above and below him:

11. Tom Barrasso, .883
12. Don Beaupre, .883
13. Allan Bester, .883
14. Mike Liut, .883
15. Billy Smith, .882
16. Grant Fuhr, .881
17. Kirk McLean, .881
18. Mike Vernon, .881
19. Pete Peeters, .881

In the 1980s those 9 goalies combined for 5 First Team All-Stars, 4 Second Team All-Stars, and 9 Stanley Cups. Every single one of them had long NHL careers. And yet nobody gave Bester another NHL shot.

I think the scouts got it wrong on this one. Bester may have been small and he may have let a few through the wickets, but the evidence suggests that he was a legitimate pro goalie and he deserved another shot at an NHL job after the age of 25. He should be remembered for what he was, the best Toronto Maple Leafs goalie of the 1980s.

 

[Stephen]

My vote goes to Peter Ing.

Outside of 1990-91, where he started 56 games for the Leafs, he played 17 NHL games for the rest of his career. Wasn't even a very good AHL goalie. Had one season as an AHL starter, the year before his season in Toronto, and posted a GAA near 4.00. After his season in the NHL, he was never more than an AHL backup again.

Statistically, there might be a few guys who are worse (generally by virtue of having played for an expansion team), but I can't think of a player with a worse resume or less proven at lower levels who got to start 50+ games in a season than Ing.

Certainly not Bester, who did have his moments in Toronto (played very well in 1983-84 after being called up from junior as a teenager), was a very good minor-league goalie, and had a nice little stint with Dallas at the end of his career. And he never played more than 43 games in a season. Not a very good goalie, but not the worst.

Either Ing or Craig Billington in 94.

 

[panorama01*]

From the "Martin Brodeur is overrated" blog which persuasively argues that Brodeur blew the 2001 Stanley Cup playoffs.

 

[panorama01*]

Craig Billington was at the 1993 All Star Game for the Wales conference. The two other goalies were Peter Sidorkiewicz and Patrick Roy.

 

[Snaibberi]

Like I said, not the worst starting goalie of all time but is definitely deserving of a mention after his performance this season. Certainly you would be able to make a case for Toskala being the worst starter in the past decade.

Yes we know that you Toronto fans like to blame solely Toskala for your crappy team, but you just dont nominate player for the worst starting goalie based only for 1 season.

Toronto .874%, 3,66 GAA (26 games)
Calgary .918, 2,27 GAA (6 games)

So he was worst ever in Toronto but rather good in Calgary?
Speaks only about the quality of the team not goalie.

Worst goalie is that guy who has played in a good team but still sucked. Expansion Ottawa goalies or San Jose goalies dont fit to that category. Alltough.. Sidorkiewicz was kinda awfull in every single season he played.. 5 seasons in a row.

Ken Wregget comes to my mind when talking good team, but not that great goalie. Weird thing though is that i have always liked Wregget