Marc-Andre Fleury's contract and the trouble with paying goalies
The Pittsburgh Penguins signed Marc-Andre Fleury to a four-year contract extension Wednesday and oh man did a lot of people have opinions about this.
In a league full of players that can spark a wide range of opinions and emotions, few are capable of making people dump gasoline on a sizzling pile of hot takes quite like the Penguins' long-time starting goalie.
When it comes to Fleury, it all comes down to two very basic, yet very passionate schools of thought.
On one side, there's the "look at the rings and count the wins" crowd. This side remembers him making a last-second save in a Game 7 of the 2009 Stanley Cup Final and sees a guy closing in on 300 career wins ... on a team that has been carried by two of the best players of their generation ... and thinks he is not only one of the NHL's best goalies, but also among the elite of the elite at the position and is as important to the Penguins' success as Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin.
On the other side, you have the crowd that looks at every playoff meltdown he has experienced since that Stanley Cup save and seems to think that he is incapable of doing anything other than turning the puck over behind the net and giving up bad goals by the dozens.
He is neither of these goalies.
What he is, is a perfectly adequate and extremely durable NHL starting goalie. He will have great games, he will have awful games. He will make a save that will completely blow your mind, and then he will do something like this that will ... completely blow your mind. He will put together a stretch where he has three shutouts in a week, and he will play so poorly in another week later in the season that he has to be benched for his backup in the playoffs.
When it comes to his play on the ice and his actual production he is virtually indistinguishable from the majority of starting goaltenders around the NHL. He will consistently put up a .913-.917 save percentage and reside right in the middle of the pack.
You could certainly do better. You could certainly do worse. And this is where we start to find the trouble with NHL goalies.
The problem isn't necessarily with this particular contract. If anything, the Penguins were wise to only go four years with it when so many teams around the league are trying to invest in six- and seven-year deals for their starting goalie, and then probably regretting it a few years later. He is an average goalie making an average starting goalie's salary. Based on the market, he is probably right where he should be in terms of payment (maybe a little above it).
Every team in the league has players that they are paying more than market value, and in many cases, that is not the worst thing in the world because there are some players and positions that are worth overpaying. It is really difficult to find a top-line goal-scorer or a 25-minute-a-night defensemen who can contribute at both ends of the ice and in all situations. When you get those guys in the prime of their careers, if you have to overpay to keep them, so be it. You are going to be a better team because of it.
But is this the case with goalies? Do you have to pay such a premium to adequately fill the spot? Just because other teams are paying so much for average production at the position, why do you have to do it as well?
It's not that the position isn't important. It is extremely important, and it can completely change a season or playoff series depending on the team. The Colorado Avalanche do not have the success they had last season without their goaltending at the level it was. The Calgary Flames are not one of the surprise teams in the NHL so far this season if not for the current play of their goalies (even if it is unsustainable) as they bail out a team that is getting badly outshot every night.
The problem with goalies is that evaluating them is a maddening, inexact science that nobody has seemed to master. And a lot of times, teams end up paying for that.
We know teams struggle with it because nobody can draft the position with any reliability, and there are a lot of bad investments and contracts floating around the league as teams stubbornly commit to goalies that are holding them back (example: Winnipeg Jets).
Meanwhile, fans and media that follow a particular team (and maybe even the teams themselves) tend to fall into some sort of confirmation bias trap where they think the goalie they watch the most, no matter who it is or what team they play for, faces the toughest shots in the league and is the only one that occassionaly gets left out to dry by his defense and has to deal with the occassional breakdown in front of him.
I know how good this goalie is because I see the shots he has to face, and nobody else in the league has to deal with this! Trust me. Nobody else could do this.
But the reality is, they all do, and they all do it. They are all going to face scoring chances and tough shots and have to deal with defensive breakdowns every night. It's the nature of the position and in a league where everybody is good, you're going to have to make tough saves.
Unless you have one of the top three or four starting goalies in the NHL (like a Henrik Lundqvist or a Tuukka Rask, for example) or one of the bottom three or four starting goalies (such as a Steve Mason or Ondrej Pavelec) there is very little that separates the rest of the pack, both in terms of their actual production, and just how much their production can vary from game to game, week to week and season to season.
Every year the save-percentage leaderboard is a mixed bag of big-name goalies, previously unknown goalies and goalies that have come out of nowhere. Between 2009-10 and 2013-14, 35 different goalies finished a season in the top 10 in the league in save percentage. Only 11 have appeared in the top 10 more than once. Only one (Lundqvist) appeared in four of the five years (and the one year he didn't, he played great in the playoffs and led his team to the Stanley Cup Final).
Most of them are going to fall somewhere between .910 and .919. Given an average goalie's workload (65 games, 28 shots per game) you might be talking about a difference of 10 or 12 goals per season from the high end to the low end of that range. How much is that worth paying for when you can probably get the same level of production for significantly less?
Is it really that crazy to think that a team like the Penguins couldn't get the same production out of Thomas Greiss and another similar goalie that they are currently getting out of Fleury? If anybody should know about this it is current Penguins general manager Jim Rutherford. After getting burned by the big-money deal he gave to Cam Ward in Carolina, two years in a row he has plucked solid goaltending off of the free-agent market for peanuts (last season it was Anton Khudobin with the Hurricanes; this season in Pittsburgh it's Greiss).
Especially when the biggest key to preventing goals is shot suppression, a factor that has little to do with who your goaltender is. Just look at these five teams from last season, their save percentage (four of which are the same, and another that was in the bottom five), and the number of goals they allowed.
When it comes to goalies, it seems more than anything else teams are willing to spend on a name, or familiarity (we know what Marc-Andre Fleury can do, but we've never seen Thomas Greiss in an everyday role so this scares us), or pedigree than what actually happens on the ice.
Just look at some of the goalies that have been in the Stanley Cup Final in the salary cap era. Carolina won the Cup in 2006 with Ward as a rookie because he got white hot over a two-month stretch before settling into a career of mediocrity. The 2007-08 and 2008-09 Detroit Red Wings were one of the best, most dominant teams in the NHL over the past 20 years and did it all with an aging Chris Osgood in net. The biggest concern during Chicago's two most recent Stanley Cup seasons was whether or not they could win with question marks like Antti Niemi or Corey Crawford in net (they could). Edmonton and Philadelphia played in the Stanley Cup Final with Dwayne Roloson and Michael Leighton.
In a league where it's possible to get by and win without a big-name goalie in net (and sometimes a completely unproven goalie), it not only seems backward, but that teams are missing an opportuinty to exploit an inefficiency and make their team better in other areas.
