Oh My Darling

[BrettHullsToe]

He was my first choice to be Dallas' new goalie last summer - good thing I ain't the GM!

 

[PunkRockLocke]

Goaltending is the most mental position there is. Like a pitcher or a Quaterback. All the guys that make it to the big league are great athletes. Becoming a starter, and then an above average starter, is all about mental strength and stability, and consistency.

Darling is having his first go at this in the best league in the world. It's no surprise he has had great flashes in the NHL, and is now struggling being thrown into this workload behind a very different team than he has grown accustomed to.

Will he pull it together and become a legitimate starter? I have no idea. History says probably not.

 

[mikepirone]

And there’s another bad goal that changes the momentum of the game after the Canes score a few minutes into the game. Getting the hang of being a starter or not he gets paid millions to stop routine saves.

 

[Bleedred]

And there’s another bad goal that changes the momentum of the game after the Canes score a few minutes into the game. Getting the hang of being a starter or not he gets paid millions to stop routine saves.

I'm purposely paying attention to him this year, after a lot of people claimed that the Canes goalies were not as bad as their save percentage said they were, but that the team defense just isn't good, thus why Ward has been bad for years and Lack started to suck when he got to Carolina. And Khudobin sucked after the first year (he's also sucked since then, up until this year). What I'm finding so far is that he's letting in a lot of stoppable shots. Not all of them are terrible soft goals and some of them are very subtle, which would not be considered ''Stoppable'' to some eyes, but it seems like damn near 1 out of every 3 goals he allows is a stoppable one. And the save percentage was exactly 90% coming into this game, and it will probably dip another point or two with tonight.

The first goal allowed tonight was not a good goal, at all. Not even close. These are bad goals. He let in a really, really bad rebound against LA last game, think it was on the OT winner. He stunk up the joint against the Rangers a couple weeks ago. Let in at least two bad goals that game, and already has the Rangers beat writers referring to him as ''Mr. Softy''. And then the game against the Rangers before that, back before Thanksgiving? He let in a puck flipped on him from center ice, that he just missed with his glove. That one was worse than most of the fluky blue line/red line shots that take a dip in the ice and somehow elude the goalie.

There was one game about a month, maybe 5 or 6 weeks ago, where he allowed 3 or 4 goals and literally 3 of them were bad goals. He let in a bad OT winner against the Blackhawks. He's stunk and earned that now sub-900 save percentage. They don't score enough goals, so it's not like a really good .920+ goalie is a surefire ticket to the playoffs for them, but they never seem to improve in net.

Honestly, I expected Darling to regress a little bit from when he was the Hawks backup, because almost all goalies drop off a little bit when they become starters. Even the backups who were quite a bit better than him when they were backups. Schneider, Rask, Talbot, Jones, all of these guys put up quite a bit higher numbers as backups. It's not that all of them have been bad starters. Schneider, Rask and Talbot have all been pretty good starters (Schneider had a bad season last year, Rask is dropping off a bit but still average, Talbot is having a bad year) and Jones has been just average as a starter. All of them were mostly better than Darling as backups, so I figured he might be a .915 starter. Didn't think he was gonna be a .900 starter though.

He's failing the eye test, as much as he is on paper. His play when watching him, corroborates exactly what that ugly save percentage number, now beginning with an 8, is telling us.