Hammond has had a weird career to say the least. Decent numbers with Bowling Green. Not very good numbers in the AHL. But is 30-15-6 with a .923 save percentage and 2.31 GAA in the show. That’s pretty damn impressive.
It’s not the move we all wanted I guess but you really can’t complain about this move.
As much as I laughed at him with the DD stuff when he was overhyping and saying he could steal a playoff round back in 2015, he hasn't really performed poorly in the NHL.
That's heavily influenced by his one monster year, but even the year after that he wasn't bad. His performance was acceptable for a backup goalie that appeared in just 24 games and started 21.
He had a very rough 6 games the next year and has only played 6 more games (very good games) since then over a 5 year span, as well as 3 playoff games 4 years ago.
I was optimistic that Gillies would be not only serviceable, but even better than the injured, beat up, zombified version of Blackwood that we had saw from the start of December until he was shutdown in the middle of January, and that was ABSOLUTELY not the case.
So I could be wrong, but we really needed to do something for two reasons. Daws can't stay up and play games the remainder of the year in the NHL and Gillies is as close as it gets to an auto loss. He's had 2 starts out of 13 where he allowed fewer than 3 goals and has allowed 4 goals in 6 of his 13 starts and that's just not acceptable. And his last 3 starts have easily been his worse since we got him.