Was Schmid the reason we lost to Carolina in the playoffs? I don't think so. Yes, we need a good goalie. But a no goalie is a magic wand. There seems to be a very, imo, false line of thinking that "All we need is a good goalie". No, sorry, the team would have been no better this past year with Markstrom, Ullmark or Saros. This is evidenced by Allen and Kahk playing phenomenal down the stretch and the team still being completely unable to string multiple wins together. There are other things that need to be addressed. Goalie is just one. We can't leave the other holes, or potentially create more, trying to get a goalie we think will magically fix everything.
Hard disagree with ''The team would have been no better with Markstrom, Ullmark or Saros'' because ''This is evidenced by Allen and Kahk playing phenomenal down the stretch and the team still being completely unable to string multiple wins together''.
You've left out that when Allen and Kahk played phenomenally down the stretch and the team was still completely unable to string multiple wins together, it was when Travis Green was the interim head coach. We didn't have Allen or Kahkonen at any point before Green was the interim head coach.
If we had Markstrom, Ullmark or Saros, I'm operating under the assumption that they would have already been here for most of the year and while Ruff was still here. All of those names are better than Daws, Schmid and the useless sack of shit that Vitek was.
Even acknowledging that the expected save percentages on the team last year under Ruff were quite a few points under the league average save percentage, we would have been better with Markstrom, Ullmark or Saros last year, especially since we won a pretty decent amount of games before Ruff was fired with Vitek (who greatly overachieved in wins) and the kids, who are all inferior to those 3 goalies. We were just on the playoff borderline about 2 weeks before Ruff was fired. Any of those guys are an upgrade over what we had, even taking into account the more chaotic hockey that was being played in front of them.
''There are other things that need to be addressed''
Well one BIG one that was a problem when we had Allen and Kahkonen playing phenomenally down the stretch but couldn't string wins together has already been eliminated and is over in Ottawa getting ready to sabotage them.
Travis Green is one of the worst head coaches the league has had in the last decade. He's so bad that I came one win off my prediction for what our record would be in 21 games under him. We won one more game/got two more points than I had predicted.
Travis Green was the biggest problem with the team at the end of the season. The biggest problem we had after we had acquired better goalies. That's how bad Travis Green is, that we lost all those games with the best goaltending we had all season, while staying in the playoff race all year with Ruff and dreadful goaltending.
Any head coach you can think of and wanna compare to Green that has coached here, other than the obvious in John MacLean, doesn't have shit on Green. As bad as you may think Hynes or Ruff were or even Nasreddine, none of them have SHIT on Travis Green.
It would have been really fun to see the Vitek/Daws/Schmid combo under Green, rather than two new guys. I'd have to think Vitek would have played as many of the games as Allen did, while Daws/Schmid or both would have gotten the few games they combined for anyway, on top of the games Kahkonen got. I can't wait to see Green as head coach with Korpisalo as his starting goalie. That could be disastrous.
