BigBadBruins7708
Registered User
He didn't kill his wife and a waiter, it's not like we're gonna take it away from him. He just wasn't a very good player that got put into a perfect situation. And was not considered NHL caliber outside of that. So, that means either he somehow got really good at 34 and 36 years old somehow...or, he was just never very good, and it's another example of team effects dictating averaging stats.
He was given away at age 38, which is evidently his prime haha
And we have the video, we know now that it was a bad goaltender where it worked out for a little bit. Like you said, he burned hot for a minute statistically - Cechmanek, Elliott stuff...no big whoop. Difference was having a team to bail him out and little league-wide competition at his position.
He was good before "34 or 36 years old". It's not his fault the league failed to notice.
He was an all american goalie at Vermont and helped lead the team to the Frozen Four
He won the equivalent of the Vezina in SM-Liiga at 24
He won the equivalent of the Hart and Pearson in SM-Liiga at 30. A league full of NHL talent due to the lockout
He was 7th in the NHL in sv% (.917) on a terrible 2006 Bruins team at 31
His Vezina wins weren't out of nowhere just because most people weren't paying attention to what he was doing. 2006 he had a .917 (7th in NHL) and 18.8 GSAA (9th in NHL), then in 2008 he had a .921 (4th in NHL) and 21.3 GSAA (2nd in NHL) and posted a .914/2.65 pushing the heavily favored Habs to 7.
Ironically for all the flash in the pan derision, let's compare him to Price. He has 4x Top 10 in sv% to Price's 5, each have 5x Top 10 in GSAA and Thomas has a significantly better career GSAA with 131 to Price's 110. Seems to me that if we're going to agree to the flash in the pan label, you also have to say in that time he accomplished as much as other HOF goalies did over 10+ year careers.