Sergei Bobrovsky's Long, Winding Road Takes Another Turn

The Florida Panthers netminder is writing his most surprising career chapter yet.

Amazingly, the Florida Panthers are 1 win away from toppling the Toronto Maple Leafs (🍁😢) and punching their ticket to the Eastern Conference Finals. There are plenty of reasons for this, ranging from Matthew Tkachuk and Carter Verhaeghe’s high-octane postseason to the full-health return of Anthony Duclair (one of my favorite players ever since I saw him pull this move), Sasha Barkov looking more like his brilliant 2021-22 self and the Leafs’ own inability to produce despite their ample talent. But maybe the biggest factor in this particular series against Toronto has been Sergei Bobrovsky — a goalie whose career has seen more ups and downs than a roller coaster.

Bobrovsky has been cast as a team’s savior plenty of times before, going back to the very beginning of his time in the NHL. Despite being an undrafted rookie, he impressed the Philadelphia Flyers so much during training camp in 2010 that the defending East champs installed the Russian phenom with zero NHL experience in net as starter. Bobrovsky delivered, too — posting a very solid .915 save percentage while becoming the youngest primary starter in net for Philly since Bernie Parent in 1967-68.

But as has often been the case with Flyers goalies, things went south in the playoffs, as Bobrovsky’s SV% fell to a dreadful .877 and he was supplanted by Brian Boucher. One more terrible season sitting behind Ilya Bryzgalov later, Bobrovsky was unceremoniously traded to Columbus for a trio of draft picks.

Immediately upon arriving with the Blue Jackets, Bobrovsky made the Flyers regret letting him go. According to my metric, he was worth 33.3 Goals Above Replacement per 82 team games during the lockout-shortened 2012-13 season — better than any other player (goalie or not) in the league that year. For his trouble, Bobrovsky earned the Vezina Trophy as the NHL’s top netminder, even if it wasn’t enough to propel Columbus into the playoffs. After a few more solid seasons, Bobrovsky was staking out a strong claim among the league’s top stars at the position.

Naturally, a big payday also followed. After the 2014-15 season, Columbus re-signed Bobrovsky to a 4-year, $29.7 million extension that would make him the league’s second-highest-paid goalie in terms of cap hit. Bobrovsky responded, however, by playing horribly in 2015-16: his 0.0 GAR/82 ranked eighth-worst among the 40 goalies who started at least 30 games that season.

But goalies are really random! The very next season, Bobrovsky was back up to 30.4 GAR/82, which once again ranked No. 1 among all players and earned him his second career Vezina Trophy. (Then in the playoffs, he face-planted to an .882 SV% as Columbus lost in the first round to the eventual-champion Penguins.) A couple more solid seasons later, Bobrovsky helped the Jackets engineer what is still maybe the greatest upset in NHL playoff history, with a .932 SV% as Columbus stunned the record-setting Lightning in a first-round sweep.

If you’re counting at home, that’s at least four towering summits and three humbling falls in what was a career less than a decade old at the time. But wait, there’s a lot more: After his strong 2019 postseason, Bobrovsky signed a 7-year, $70 million contract with Florida to once again be the league’s second-highest-paid goalie — and a replacement for longtime netminder Roberto Luongo. Almost immediately, that contract also began to look very bad, as Bobrovsky was actually below replacement level (-1.1 GAR/82) and ranked sixth-worst among regular starters in 2019-20. Over the next few seasons, he unsurprisingly found himself splitting starts with other younger, better-performing goalies.

And yet, here we are in 2023, and a 34-year-old Bobrovsky has reclaimed the role of Florida’s No. 1 goalie. He has already helped reprise his familiar role as an upset-minded backstop during Florida’s historic first-round victory over the record-setting Boston Bruins (albeit with a less instrumental performance — he had a mediocre .891 SV% in the series). And he’s genuinely playing great — with a .938 SV% — in the Panthers’ second-round upset bid against Toronto.

While every playoff starter is always seemingly one bad outing away from being the backup, Bobrovsky might be more comfortable with the harsh reality of NHL goaltending life than just about anyone else left in the tournament. Perhaps more than any goalie in recent memory, Bobrovsky has seen firsthand how quickly a goalie can go from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows — and, importantly, back to the highs again and again.

Filed under: NHL