Goaltending has been by far the most talked about subject for the Flyers this year. I have been very concerned about it, and at no point this season was I convinced that the Bobby Boucher tandem would be good enough to win in the playoffs. Once the playoffs arrived, their performance was abysmal.
You can say lots of things about the role of a goaltender on a hockey team. I would agree that you don't need a top-notch goalie to win the cup. That said, goaltender is an important position. IT IS NOT AN ON/OFF SWITCH, where its either on/"good-enough" or off/"not-good-enough".
Like everything other aspect of hockey, there are many degrees to the quality of a goalie's performance. It can be great, terrible, and everything in between. The worse your goaltending slides down the scale performance-wise, the better your team offense and team defense have to perform to compensate. Just like a team with obvious holes in their team offense or defense will struggle to win, so will a team with a glaring hole in goal. I don't know what percentage of importance you could assign to goaltending overall, but it's more than 0%, that's for sure.
Teams with great offense but so-so defense can win, and vice versa. Teams with great offense but awful defense (and vice versa) cannot succeed in the playoffs. Goaltending is not any different; no level offensive of might will render the position irrelevant.
Perhaps the only aspect of this that makes goaltending different from other aspects of the game is that goaltending needs to be a 60 minute effort. You can step off the gas pedal on offense for stretches of a game for instance, but 58 solid minutes of play by a goalie can be destroyed by 2 bad goals allowed. It's an intangible quality that is hard to quantify, but basically you just need your goalie to avoid soft goals and make some timely stops. Seems unfair to the goalie when you put it this way, but that's the way it is for goalies. A goalie can play pretty well for 50 minutes, but 10 shaky minutes with 2 or 3 goals allowed (a common occurence for Bobrovsky this season) amounts to a mediocre game when viewed as a whole.
The unfortunate truth is that the Flyers goaltending this season (and particularly down the stretch and playoffs) is hovering around the 'awful' category. You can deceive yourself with stats or over-analyze every goal allowed and how it wasn't their fault, but most simply neither Bobrovsky (right now) nor Boucher are NHL starter-quality goalies;
-Bobrovsky is 22 year old rookie who never played in North America and is clearly not a finished product at the NHL level and was slated to spend the entire season in the AHL.
-Brian Boucher, who aside from his three stints with the Flyers, has played for 5 other NHL teams, all of whom deemed him no better than a backup and let him walk as soon as his contract was up. He is 3 years removed from having NO NHL offers and playing for the Flyers' AHL team.
The Flyers pulled their starting goalie due to poor performance 5 TIMES in two playoff rounds. That is staggering, I've never seen anything like it. Other factors can contribute to that, but there is no way that can occur unless the goaltending is incredibly poor.
The Flyers must upgrade in goal to compete for the big prize. That doesn't mean they must break the bank on a big name goalie, but the Flyers cannot ignore the position or offer half-baked solutions, just as a team with perennially bad team offense or defense must meaningfully address the issue. They're an exciting team, but they're not so good that can cede a large mismatch in goal against most opponents and still expect to win. Like everybody else they need to look for maximum cap value in acquiring a reliable goalie.
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