Florida can’t finish for shit. I thought the coach hits was a bit of a head scratcher for sure but they’re the worst shooting team in the league (7.8%!) and yet the Panthars are still 19th with 3.08 GF/G.
In comparison, the Blues are 31st with 7.9% Shooting% and are 32nd with 2.33 GF/G.
That’s the difference between a team that generates a lot of offense but can’t hit the broad side of the barn vs a team that more rode it’s hot shooting hand last season. (Though losing Montgomery was presumably a big blow for St Louis.)
It also looks like Bob is back to being Bob of the last 2-3 years before last season. Still early, but it's looking like last season was just more of an ''On'' year for him than the two years prior being ''Off'' years.
And his last year in Columbus wasn't all that great. He had a very late season surge (just like Cory Schneider did that year lol) and he had 7 shutouts in his last 23 starts that year to really bump up his play. He was a .901% for the season and 2 shutouts after 39 games on February 9th of 2019. He wound up finishing with a .913% after 62 games and 9 shutouts.
I clearly remember this as it was happening and the talk of ''Will Bob get more than Price?'' was becoming very hot for the pending UFA Bobrovsky.
His GSAx was also -2.84 that year, despite a +2.39 GSAA.
Conclusion is to not expect 21-22 Bob to be 22-23 Bob. It's probably safer to expect the 2019-2021 version again for this year. Same thing goes for Jonathan Quick. Goalies don't bounce back permanently after multiple poor seasons at that age. 21-22 was clearly an up year for Quick after 3 consecutive lousy decline years.
Mike Smith did put together 2 good years in a row at 39-40 after 2 bad seasons in a row, but both seasons he played a bit more limited due to a shortened season the first year and injured season last year. Not to mention he had a very 2019 Columbus Bobrovsky end to last year after the coaching change, where he was surging the last couple of months of the season.
All in all, goaltending didn't really make Florida a good team last year, they still would have made the playoffs with Bobrovsky playing as poorly as he did the several seasons before, but they definitely wouldn't have won the presidents trophy.
