What I was shaking my head about was that Maurice's comment implied that before the win the door was "closed" for more regular play. That kind of thinking would be detrimental to the team and is not consistent with a fair evaluation of Mason's play.
As for the rest... I might be showing my bias against Maurice a bit, but what good does it do (short term or long term) to start Helle tomorrow unless you plan to run him for disproportionately longer stretches of games?
Hmm.. Do you think that Mason should have had regular starts when Hellebuyck was playing so damn well? I have to admit, I am not a ride-the-hot-hand-until-he-stumbles kind of guy, so I would tend to agree, but I definitely don't feel knowledgeable enough about it to start calling out the coach. You DEFINITELY have more experience than me, so if you feel comfortable making judgements, more power to you
. I will say in this case our schedule did lean strongly towards riding the hot hand.
Anyways, what good does it do? I'm a little confused by that. Well, what bad does it do? I don't think it will impact anyone's development in any way, I don't think anyone is going to get mad about it in anyway, and I don't think we are remotely close enough to predicting which goalie is going to over perform or under perform their average on any given night to say that it does the team good/bad. I'm actually genuinely curious, what bad do you think it can do to start Helly tomorrow?
I would consider Hellebuyck our starter right now. I think it would be hard to not consider him our starter. But even if they were 1A and 1B right now, that would suggest 50/50 split of playing time. Well, Hellebuyck has had more rest since last playing, so why not play him next? I would think the default choice, as long as Mason is not our starter, is to put Hellebuyck in net.
