A good starting goalie is invaluable to an NHL team. He’s also both surprisingly easy and shockingly difficult to acquire.
No other position player has the ability to impact the game in the same way. A great forward can make a difference for 20 minutes a night, while a great defenceman can do so for literally half the game at times, but a great goaltender can take over a game and render the efforts of an entire team totally pointless.
There is no better recent example of this than the performance Ben Scrivens put on in a late January game for the Edmonton Oilers against the San Jose Sharks. The result of the game was pretty much what one would expect—the Sharks put the boots to the lowly Oilers, and it wasn’t close.
Except that Edmonton ended up winning the game by a 3-0 score, thanks to a 59-save performance from Scrivens:
Scrivens had been acquired by the Oilers from Los Angeles just two weeks earlier, at the relatively cheap price of a third-round pick. He’s the favourite to start for Edmon ...
Read Full Article at Bleacher Report - NHL
Article written by Jonathan Willis
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August 13th, 2014 by Jonathan Willis Leave a reply »
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