Behind Enemy Lines
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Never get in the way of a good conspiracy theory! lol.
I mean who's ever heard of a young NHL player have a development slide adjusting to the best competition in the world. Or to think a young goaltender way ahead of the development curve might struggle behind a corroding hockey team with dysfunctional coaching. Could never happen. And throwing random articles about Hart's goaltending, here's one that's actually from this year, not cherry picked from deep within the player and team's lost season: https://theathletic.com/3172222/2022/03/09/in-carter-hart-the-flyers-finally-have-their-goalie-and-they-cant-afford-to-waste-him/
"This wasn’t just a one-off stellar game for Hart, either. In spite of the Flyers’ awful record, in the midst of a lost season, Hart has been as good as he’s ever been at the NHL level.
That’s not to say Hart has delivered Vezina-quality results, of course. His statistics have suffered since the turn of the calendar year, dropping his save percentage from a stellar .918 to a passable-but-not-eye-catching .910 entering Tuesday’s contest. But in the wake of his 47-save showing, Hart is now back up at .914 — which is exactly what he produced in 2019-20, when he had the benefit of backstopping the only quality Flyers club of the past four seasons.
This particular roster? Let’s just say it’s not that.
Here’s a bold statement: this is the best version of Hart yet. Yes, he played better in the bubble — particularly against the Montreal Canadiens — but that was a weird environment and a small sample. And yes, Hart’s performance by public advanced metrics was a bit better in 2019-20 (+7.25 Goals Saved Above Expectation) than this season thus far (+5.64 GSAx).
But as useful as public metrics can be, I have my doubts that they can fully account for the impact that a severely underperforming team can have on a goaltender’s results, particularly when team-wide single-game collapses become a monthly (or even semi-weekly) occurrence, as they have for the Flyers.
It’s that malaise that can drag down the raw metrics of netminders, the result of games that for a high-functioning team would be humdrum 3-1 defeats but the creeping sense of “here we go again” fatalism turns them into 6-1 blowouts. Those games are rarely the goalie’s fault entirely, yet he’s the one who has to eat the statistics-deflating save percentage and shake off the potential hit to one’s confidence that comes with a crooked goal total.
That phenomenon almost certainly played a role in Hart’s ugly 2020-21 campaign. To be clear, Hart deserves his share of the blame for how last season went off the rails, particularly in March. He simply wasn’t good enough. But it’s also true that the Flyers’ skaters hung him out to dry on a regular basis over the season’s first month and a half, and the cumulative effect of those games likely contributed directly to the technical crisis that March became for him.
Now, this Flyers club isn’t quite as chaotic and structureless in the defensive zone as the previous incarnation. But it certainly hasn’t been good — Evolving Hockey ranks the Flyers as the fifth-worst team in the NHL when it comes to expected goal prevention. Yet this time, in spite of the Flyers’ defensive and overall struggles, Hart is still plugging away, delivering above average results on the whole, and even the occasional true gem, like on Tuesday. It’s clear he’s learned from his 2020-21 struggles, especially in terms of not letting team struggles bleed over into his individual quality of play."
Now there are absolutely better goaltender coaches than Schwartz out there. However goaltender draft and development is another in a long list of organizational fails for the Oilers. A volume pick strategy of wasting second day draft picks hoping to find needles in a haystack wasted a lot of draft collateral for over a decade. Patchworking goaltending with two aging out of prime, fully formed goaltenders, Smith and Koskinen, left little development work to overhaul journeyman players. Smith had a lifelong goaltender coach who extended back to his minor hockey days, augmented some summer support with a specialist in bio mechanics and goaltending to improve balance and positioning while still running with Schwartz for the full season of his great renaissance last year. Talbot was good until he and this Oilers team got awful. He's won and lost starter job's in all cities played in since leaving Edmonton. The overwhelming fail has been Edmonton's shitty, revolving management groups that tried a bailer twine and duct take fix for the most important position in the sport.
Criticism of Schwartz might have some validity. But a symptom of the real issue of a systemic failure organization just now lurching out of its Decade of Darkness (trademark). And Schwartz criticism must recognize his success with Hart and Skinner who he's worked with since their minor hockey days. Given some talent at front end of their development there is evidence that Schwartz can deliver the coaching support to reach the elite level.
