The after is easily explained as he had a major injury.
Agreed, and the before could perhaps be partly explained by the influence of Jacques Plante. Parent gives Plante a lot of credit for helping develop his game while he was in Toronto, and the
Flyers later hired Plante specifically to work with Parent when he was struggling during the 1977-78 season.
It should also be noted again that Parent had three years of .925, .925 and .921 from '67-68 to '69-70 on an expansion team, which perhaps doesn't make .933 and .918 on one of the league's best teams in the mid-'70s look like that huge of an outlier after all.
A potentially big caveat though is that the Flyers saw a massive drop in shots against from 1972-73 to 1973-74, going from 34.3 SA/60 to 28.4 SA/60. They had the same coach and mostly the same roster, so I don't know why there would have been such a big difference over just one season, but it worked to Bernie Parent's advantage. I also don't know how they did it given that the '73-74 Flyers faced a lot more opposing power plays (422 compared to 360 in '72-73), which should have made things tougher for Parent.
Does anyone feel like Parent is getting the shaft here? I was really feeling good about him a couple of rounds ago but as Mike Farkas said, every time I dig deeper I get a little more uneasy with him.
I had Parent much too high on my original list, and now I'm a bit with the rest of the crowd here in that I'm not entirely sure where to put him (other than likely somewhere behind Esposito and Belfour who I have at 1A/1B this round).
I don't think I entirely agree that the rest of his career is not top 60 worthy though. Even if you take out Parent's 1973-74 and 1974-75 seasons, he still had a .915 career save percentage compared to league average of .901. Granted that was during an expansion era, but Parent played mostly for an expansion team in Philadelphia.
Taking all the goalies from 1967-68 to 1978-79, and multiplying the difference between their save percentages and league average by the number of shots against to get the number of goals saved above average (essentially league-adjusted save percentage weighted by playing time), Parent still ranks third behind Esposito and Dryden in that period at 160 goals better than average even without 1973-74 and 1974-75 included, although obviously much closer to the pack than the two at the top:
1. Tony Esposito: +383 (.914 save % vs. .894 avg)
2. Ken Dryden: +323 (.921 save % vs. .892 avg)
3. Bernie Parent: +160 (.915 save % vs. .901 avg)
4. Glenn Resch: +157 (.916 save % vs. .888 avg)
5. Jacques Plante: +129 (.927 save % vs. .904 avg)
(With 1973-74 and 1974-75 in there Parent would have been at +280).
Parent was also fairly well regarded in the early '70s it seems. When he bolted to the WHA (for a boatload of cash, reportedly $750K over 5 years), he was described by AP as
"one of the best young goaltenders in the NHL". And his overall longevity is pretty good as well, breaking into the original six league at 20 and retiring as the fourth oldest goalie in the league in his last season (and likely would have played longer if not for his eye injury). When he retired he was ranked 10th on the all-time games played list.
Overall, I think Parent was almost certainly not quite as good during his peak as his reputation suggests, which is mainly why I don't have him as high as I once did, but there is still good reason to believe that he was a talented goalie during the rest of his career.
One thing on the negative side though for anyone who really doesn't like goalies quitting during playoff series, apparently Bernie Parent did that in the WHA,
refusing to play until he got paid in the 1974 WHA playoffs.
