This is a fair point. The team a (biased) evaluator of Jarry and DeSmith has deemed Jarry the starter making $3.5M annually and DeSmith the backup making far less. They also protected Jarry in the ED. Is that my favorite argument to make? No. But given the weirdness around goalies I wouldn't be surprised if backups regularly had better or comparable stats to starters.
Jarry has been very good during the '19-'20 season and the middle of the '20-'21 season. He had a brutally bad playoff series which is undeniable. But there's been a sizable amount of good in Jarry's play the last couple of years as well.
My distaste for 12-player polls aside, this is a quality post and a good argument for why we should "open up" the polling as soon as the next round to let posters make these well-reasoned pleas for players. Like, if someone wants to argue ZAR/EROD analytics or Riikola offensive ability or Zohorna being a physical beast or DeSmith > Jarry, that's good discussion on this board.
The key with progress on this board is to do everything in your power to dissuade making discussion personal. Bring up new topics, ignore jerks when insulted (I struggle with this), try to encourage less active users into contributing more, posting more about non hockey related stuff when nothing is happening, etc...
I actually think it's been a fairly good summer for the board, whenever I checked in. Considering how little interesting Pens topics there are at the moment, people have made an effort to raise their game a little. The respect level has been pretty ok and more posts are paragraphs instead of one-liners.
My point being that I highly encourage you and others to do what you're suggesting, and allow room for more outside views. Riikola's usage was weird here and some will think higher of him than others. I also believe that Zahorna has some pretty sneaky upside, as well as Center experience in Czech (quite recently) that will be an asset soon when (not if
) the injury plague hits.
We'll get some actual juicy stuff to talk about soon thankfully.