Sergei Bobrovsky and the Panthers Are Confusing Us All over Again
Sergei Bobrovsky and the Panthers Are Confusing Us All over Again
Hockey's most up-and-down goalie (maybe ever?) is incapable of providing a dull moment.
Denied at home in Game 5 on Tuesday, the Florida Panthers will once again look to eliminate the Boston Bruins in tonight’s Game 6 on the road. Florida is still the betting favorite to win the Cup among teams in the East — with apologies to the New York Rangers — but the team that might be the most talented in the league isn’t necessarily going to make things easy on themselves.
One big reason why? Goalie Sergei Bobrovsky refuses predictability, as usual.
A year ago, as Bobrovsky was backstopping the Panthers to an unlikely Stanley Cup Finals run from the No. 8 seed, he was in the middle of a very odd multi-season arc. The veteran netminder (and two-time Vezina Trophy winner as the NHL’s top goalie) had been solid enough as Florida entered the 2022 playoffs with the league’s best record, and he wasn’t even that bad despite his team getting humiliated in the second round. But there still was the sense that the Panthers couldn’t wait to replace the 34-year-old Bobrovsky with a younger option, like 21-year-old Spencer Knight.
Though Knight later spent the 2022-23 season battling his own personal challenges, Bobrovsky did nothing to dispel the notion that Florida needed to move on in net as soon as they got the chance, regardless of his bloated contract. He ranked 28th out of 45 regular goalies in Goals Saved Above Average during the regular season, posting his second-worst season since 2016-17 by Goals Above Replacement. The Panthers went into the 2023 playoffs with Alex Lyon as starter because they didn’t trust Bobrovsky to carry the load for them in net.
Six weeks later, Bobrovsky had Florida in the Finals, and he ended up being the second-most valuable goalie of the playoffs by GAR (trailing only Adin Hill of the champion Vegas Golden Knights).
Perhaps buoyed by their playoff run, this year’s Panthers were much better during the regular season, vying for their second President’s Trophy in three seasons before falling short to the New York Rangers. And Bobrovsky was one of the major reasons why: He ranked third among all goalies in Goals Saved and fourth in GAR, helping Florida rank first in defense as a team1 and earning yet another Vezina nomination for his efforts. If the Panthers could skate to the Finals after a mediocre regular season in net, imagine how tough they would be coming off a season with top-tier goaltending!
And the Panthers have been good. They are 7-3 in the postseason, ranking third in goals per game, and they’re on the verge of knocking out the Bruins for the second consecutive postseason. For decades, this team couldn’t buy a postseason win; now the Panthers are perennially a team to fear in the playoffs.
But in yet another strange twist, they’ve done it despite mediocre play in net from Bobrovsky.
After that fourth-place GAR finish during the regular season, Bobrovsky currently ranks 12th in playoff goaltending GAR — and for context, only 15 goalies have started four or more games this postseason. In other words, Bobrovsky’s 2024 is playing out like a bizarro version of his 2023.
This is not to say Bobrovsky won’t turn around a save percentage that has been 6% worse than league average in these playoffs. And this team is so good top-to-bottom that it might be able to overcome mediocre goaltending for at least a little while longer.
But if the story of each year’s NHL playoffs is invariably that goalies are the most significant — yet also the most chaotic — factor in a team’s fortunes, Bobrovsky is the perfect manifestation of that truism. Capable, as he is, of both the highest of highs and lowest of lows in net, his performance cannot be predicted despite its outsized importance. He is the trickster god of hockey, and he may yet have more mischief in store for these playoffs.
Filed under: NHL
An absolutely stunning development for a team that was all-offense just a few seasons earlier.
I wonder if the effect that you describe for Sergei is not a malady of goalies generally. By that I mean that a larger than realized deviation in annual performance belies any perception of sustained excellence at the position beyond relatively short periods i.e. the "hot goalie." For example, Vasilevskiy I believe had a down year this year after two mediocre ones following a period where he gained a reputation as the best goalie in the business. He's only 29 but paid a ton for what alarmingly seems now looks like past excellence.
Humans are driven to find patterns in nature and can often be misled into believing that short term effects are lasting ones. This is a particular risk at Stanley Cup time when fans are hyper-focused and ready to anoint a new great goalie who later turns out to be "not so much." A contributing factor is that front offices are on the clock so to speak and have to make decisions - they can't wait for the data to accumulate.
Several years ago, I looked at soccer goalkeepers and the variation year-over-year was significant. To the point that you could argue that beyond a certain base level of competence at the level of play (e.g. high school v. college v. pro) there was no material long term difference in who you had out there. Great one year, awful the next. It seemed an inherent limitation of the position where focusing on the floor and paying for that was superior to overpaying for a dream about an illusory ceiling.
Furthermore, when I checked, soccer goalkeepers contracts were not expensive relative to other positions - suggesting that the front offices as a wisdom of crowds exercise sort of figured this out and didn't over pay for the position. At least, that is what I recall.
Football Outsiders several years ago reached a similar conclusion with regard to field goal kicker accuracy. Now, it is quite possible that the talent curve for these positions is a highly skewed one, where 95% or so of the performers are essentially identical over a long term simply by surviving the selection rigors of playing at that level. Still, perhaps 5% or so might truly be separated from the rest over time. See Justin Tucker.
Again, my look at soccer was a long time ago and those observations admittedly might not apply to hockey goalies. But I would be interested in looking at some form of a "sustainability index" (if it exists) by position to see which positions are worthy of being paid long term and which are not. Might be insightful.