Alright HOH, I have to admit I'm baffled, as I watch yet another top 5 discussion devolving into the same old well-worn path where regular poster after regular poster feels it utterly necessary to interrupt their busy days to make detailed posts about the Buffalo Sabres' offensive exploits in the 1999 Eastern Conference playoffs.
Like I get it, we feel it's necessary to defend the idea that nobody wins anything singlehandedly because we can't have hyperbolic claims on this board. Great, but then I have to ask: Why does it seem like we still allow every hyperbolic narrative criticizing Hasek to stand unchallenged? Are we actually dealing with hyperbole in any consistent way here, or is it just that one type of alleged hyperbole is, for some peculiar reason, seen as far more troubling than others?
In my view, a good way to put to the bed the hyperbole would be to not immediately follow it up by stating untrue things like that Hasek played on a good team in '99.
Slightly over 4 months after the 1999 Stanley Cup was awarded, Buffalo had a 3 month stretch without their superstar goalie in net, and they went 17-17-3 and found themselves in 11th place in the Eastern Conference on his return. From '97-99, Hasek's absolute peak years, the Sabres were 13-26-9 in the regular season with other goalies in net. Buffalo had a below league average offence in every single regular season from 1994-95 to 2002-03. They also started the playoffs on the road 5 times in the 6 seasons where they had a Vezina-winning goalie in net. Think about how much value the best goalie in the league adds, now think about what kind of team ends up as a #5-#8 seed, and now subtract the former from the latter.
I fail to see how any of those things are particularly good, which means that the case for any version of the late '90s Sabres being a good team outside of their netminder necessarily relies on them magically going up several levels in the postseason out of nowhere because we subjectively feel like they did. Yes, their team offence definitely ran hot in some series, which can happen to any team over a shorter time frame, but it also disappeared almost entirely in others. Other than that, maybe the most maximally charitable I can be here while still taking into account all of the relevant evidence is that perhaps Joe Juneau and Stu Barnes were among the impactful trade deadline pickups of all-time.
That's without even discussing in detail the career arcs of the regular Sabres forwards of that era, pretty much none of whom other than Mike Peca and Miro Satan ever consistently established themselves as top-6ers in other environments after leaving Buffalo, which again would be an unusual state of affairs indeed for a supposedly "good team".
Don't get me wrong, I completely understand the frustration of exaggerated, bad arguments (for the record, no goalie has singlehandedly won everything ever, that obviously can never happen based on the team sport nature of hockey, and without Hasek the Sabres would have been a nondescript playoff bubble team, not the '92-93 Ottawa Senators or something). But overcorrecting in the opposite direction is not a solution, it's just a different type of wrong.
John LeClair, a member of the franchise that played the most playoff games against the Hasek-era Sabres, was recently quoted in the Athletic's top99 article on the Dominator:
“The nights before we played him,” said former Flyers left wing John LeClair, “I was awake thinking, ‘What am I going to do to score on this guy?’
“He got into a lot of players’ heads. When we played Buffalo, we spent a lot more time on the goalie situation than we did other teams. ‘Try this … try to get him to do this … maybe try this.’ But you could scout all you wanted, and it didn’t matter because he was so unpredictable.”
While we're out here correcting mistaken hyperbole, can we maybe stop making this baseless claim in every single Hasek thread, please?
1. "Losing early in the playoffs as much as he did" is a frankly bizarre bit of a shade, given the actual facts. Hasek's teams lost in the first round only 3 times in his entire career when he started game 1 of the playoffs. That's a completely ordinary number for a goalie, even accounting for Hasek's delayed NHL start. I could bring up a number of comps here, but the obvious one is Martin Brodeur and his 7 first round exits in 16 postseasons, all of course without anyone holding it against his playoff reputation or suggesting that his stats are unduly inflated.
2. Hasek's first round losses came against opponents ranked #2, #3 and #5 in the league. Repeatedly drawing heavyweights in round 1 is not beneficial for a goalie's stats in any category.
3. Nearly all of the worst individual playoffs are also in first round losses. Goalie stats are more variable over small sample sizes, this is like the first day of Hockey Stats 101. The bigger the sample, i.e. the more seasons you add together, the more a goalie regresses towards his actual talent level, and if we're talking about Hasek's entire career here then it doesn't matter much at all.
4. Obviously I disagree about who is really providing "mysticism" about Hasek in this thread.
1. I think there is no good evidence that Buffalo ever played a defensive structure that was significantly beneficial to Hasek's stats, with the possible exception of 1993-94 and maybe 2000-01 as well (in part because of improved team discipline in that latter case). It's definitely not obvious that his late '90s peak was aided in any significant way by his team's tactics. There's no contextual evidence that suggests that is true from Buffalo's backup goalies, based on their performance as teammates vs. elsewhere. Lindy Ruff is absolutely not some Claude Julien type who demonstrably insulated his goalies at every stop:
Lindy Ruff With Goalies Not Named Hasek in Net, Regular Season Coaching Career:
One important piece of evidence that works against the "Hasek had it easy in terms of shot quality in '99" or "Buffalo only allowed medium danger chances" theories is that the Sabres took more minors than any other Dead Puck Era playoff team other than the '04 Flames. As a result, 24% of Hasek's recorded shots against came with the other team on the power play, the third-highest ratio of any Cup Finalist goalie since the NHL started tracking official stats-by-strength in 1998. To show how much of a difference that can make, in 2003 J.S. Giguere faced only 11% of his shots against on the PP. Adjust for those, and the stats gap is not remotely as wide as @Hockey Outsider is claiming here.
The Sabres were also heavily penalized in the regular seasons from 1996-97 to 1998-99, again during Hasek's absolute peak, which means that for them to be improving shot quality after taking those extra PP shots into account they would have had to be elite at ES high danger chance prevention, and I just don't see any evidence to think that's accurate.
2. Of course Buffalo took more offensive risks than usual at certain times during the Hasek era in an attempt to generate offence, because that's the obviously correct strategy for an underpowered offensive team with an all-time great goalie.
Buffalo's 1998 series against Montreal is the oft-cited, basically prototypical historical example of a series where a team went for broke offensively because they trust their goalie. It's why after a series where the winning team scored 17 goals in 4 games during the DPE (!!!), the quotes from the losing team still sounded like this:
"The bottom line in this series was written by one man, and his name was Hasek" - Alain Vigneault
"Look at it this way, they had 8, 10 scoring chances. He faced 20 or 25. That was the theme of the series" - Andy Moog
"I hope every one of them tucks in every night and says thank you [for Hasek]" - Mark Recchi
Now, I actually agree that the '99 Sabres weren't quite as aggressive in terms of taking risks as the '98 team, given that they had a bit better forward depth and no longer had to rely on Matthew Barnaby as their top scorer. It's sometimes easy to blend years together, so sure, some of the claims from that period are going to be at least slightly exaggerated if we're talking exclusively about '99, but why would we be solely focusing on one postseason anyway?
Of course those Sabres didn't allow breakaways for fun, but they certainly did take chances offensively at times that better teams didn't need to take because that made perfect sense given their roster, and because not all teams have the same risk/reward tradeoffs.
Again, just really confused more than anything here. @Professor What makes a reasonable take (yes, it's completely reasonable that the Sabres don't get out of the first round without elite goaltending in 1999, see @Hockey Outsider in post #198 for why this is the case) and the self-appointed hyperbole police descend immediately, yet you can call Hasek an open quitter in the floweriest language possible all you want and nobody bats an eye.
And here's the thing: At least calling Hasek a quitter makes some sense as a narrative, because it actually exists. Reasonable people can disagree over how much it actually happened, sure, but it's there. Some of this other stuff though has literally nothing at all behind it and seems to pop up again and again. I guess I'm just saying that if this board wants to stop hyperbole, let's maybe actually deal with all hyperbole?
Like I get it, we feel it's necessary to defend the idea that nobody wins anything singlehandedly because we can't have hyperbolic claims on this board. Great, but then I have to ask: Why does it seem like we still allow every hyperbolic narrative criticizing Hasek to stand unchallenged? Are we actually dealing with hyperbole in any consistent way here, or is it just that one type of alleged hyperbole is, for some peculiar reason, seen as far more troubling than others?
In my view, a good way to put to the bed the hyperbole would be to not immediately follow it up by stating untrue things like that Hasek played on a good team in '99.
Slightly over 4 months after the 1999 Stanley Cup was awarded, Buffalo had a 3 month stretch without their superstar goalie in net, and they went 17-17-3 and found themselves in 11th place in the Eastern Conference on his return. From '97-99, Hasek's absolute peak years, the Sabres were 13-26-9 in the regular season with other goalies in net. Buffalo had a below league average offence in every single regular season from 1994-95 to 2002-03. They also started the playoffs on the road 5 times in the 6 seasons where they had a Vezina-winning goalie in net. Think about how much value the best goalie in the league adds, now think about what kind of team ends up as a #5-#8 seed, and now subtract the former from the latter.
I fail to see how any of those things are particularly good, which means that the case for any version of the late '90s Sabres being a good team outside of their netminder necessarily relies on them magically going up several levels in the postseason out of nowhere because we subjectively feel like they did. Yes, their team offence definitely ran hot in some series, which can happen to any team over a shorter time frame, but it also disappeared almost entirely in others. Other than that, maybe the most maximally charitable I can be here while still taking into account all of the relevant evidence is that perhaps Joe Juneau and Stu Barnes were among the impactful trade deadline pickups of all-time.
That's without even discussing in detail the career arcs of the regular Sabres forwards of that era, pretty much none of whom other than Mike Peca and Miro Satan ever consistently established themselves as top-6ers in other environments after leaving Buffalo, which again would be an unusual state of affairs indeed for a supposedly "good team".
Don't get me wrong, I completely understand the frustration of exaggerated, bad arguments (for the record, no goalie has singlehandedly won everything ever, that obviously can never happen based on the team sport nature of hockey, and without Hasek the Sabres would have been a nondescript playoff bubble team, not the '92-93 Ottawa Senators or something). But overcorrecting in the opposite direction is not a solution, it's just a different type of wrong.
John LeClair, a member of the franchise that played the most playoff games against the Hasek-era Sabres, was recently quoted in the Athletic's top99 article on the Dominator:
“The nights before we played him,” said former Flyers left wing John LeClair, “I was awake thinking, ‘What am I going to do to score on this guy?’
“He got into a lot of players’ heads. When we played Buffalo, we spent a lot more time on the goalie situation than we did other teams. ‘Try this … try to get him to do this … maybe try this.’ But you could scout all you wanted, and it didn’t matter because he was so unpredictable.”
While we're out here correcting mistaken hyperbole, can we maybe stop making this baseless claim in every single Hasek thread, please?
1. "Losing early in the playoffs as much as he did" is a frankly bizarre bit of a shade, given the actual facts. Hasek's teams lost in the first round only 3 times in his entire career when he started game 1 of the playoffs. That's a completely ordinary number for a goalie, even accounting for Hasek's delayed NHL start. I could bring up a number of comps here, but the obvious one is Martin Brodeur and his 7 first round exits in 16 postseasons, all of course without anyone holding it against his playoff reputation or suggesting that his stats are unduly inflated.
2. Hasek's first round losses came against opponents ranked #2, #3 and #5 in the league. Repeatedly drawing heavyweights in round 1 is not beneficial for a goalie's stats in any category.
3. Nearly all of the worst individual playoffs are also in first round losses. Goalie stats are more variable over small sample sizes, this is like the first day of Hockey Stats 101. The bigger the sample, i.e. the more seasons you add together, the more a goalie regresses towards his actual talent level, and if we're talking about Hasek's entire career here then it doesn't matter much at all.
4. Obviously I disagree about who is really providing "mysticism" about Hasek in this thread.
1. I think there is no good evidence that Buffalo ever played a defensive structure that was significantly beneficial to Hasek's stats, with the possible exception of 1993-94 and maybe 2000-01 as well (in part because of improved team discipline in that latter case). It's definitely not obvious that his late '90s peak was aided in any significant way by his team's tactics. There's no contextual evidence that suggests that is true from Buffalo's backup goalies, based on their performance as teammates vs. elsewhere. Lindy Ruff is absolutely not some Claude Julien type who demonstrably insulated his goalies at every stop:
Lindy Ruff With Goalies Not Named Hasek in Net, Regular Season Coaching Career:
| GAA | Save % | LgAvg GAA | LgAvg Sv% | |
| Lindy Ruff, career | 2.73 | 0.907 | 2.64 | 0.910 |
One important piece of evidence that works against the "Hasek had it easy in terms of shot quality in '99" or "Buffalo only allowed medium danger chances" theories is that the Sabres took more minors than any other Dead Puck Era playoff team other than the '04 Flames. As a result, 24% of Hasek's recorded shots against came with the other team on the power play, the third-highest ratio of any Cup Finalist goalie since the NHL started tracking official stats-by-strength in 1998. To show how much of a difference that can make, in 2003 J.S. Giguere faced only 11% of his shots against on the PP. Adjust for those, and the stats gap is not remotely as wide as @Hockey Outsider is claiming here.
The Sabres were also heavily penalized in the regular seasons from 1996-97 to 1998-99, again during Hasek's absolute peak, which means that for them to be improving shot quality after taking those extra PP shots into account they would have had to be elite at ES high danger chance prevention, and I just don't see any evidence to think that's accurate.
2. Of course Buffalo took more offensive risks than usual at certain times during the Hasek era in an attempt to generate offence, because that's the obviously correct strategy for an underpowered offensive team with an all-time great goalie.
Buffalo's 1998 series against Montreal is the oft-cited, basically prototypical historical example of a series where a team went for broke offensively because they trust their goalie. It's why after a series where the winning team scored 17 goals in 4 games during the DPE (!!!), the quotes from the losing team still sounded like this:
"The bottom line in this series was written by one man, and his name was Hasek" - Alain Vigneault
"Look at it this way, they had 8, 10 scoring chances. He faced 20 or 25. That was the theme of the series" - Andy Moog
"I hope every one of them tucks in every night and says thank you [for Hasek]" - Mark Recchi
Now, I actually agree that the '99 Sabres weren't quite as aggressive in terms of taking risks as the '98 team, given that they had a bit better forward depth and no longer had to rely on Matthew Barnaby as their top scorer. It's sometimes easy to blend years together, so sure, some of the claims from that period are going to be at least slightly exaggerated if we're talking exclusively about '99, but why would we be solely focusing on one postseason anyway?
Of course those Sabres didn't allow breakaways for fun, but they certainly did take chances offensively at times that better teams didn't need to take because that made perfect sense given their roster, and because not all teams have the same risk/reward tradeoffs.
Again, just really confused more than anything here. @Professor What makes a reasonable take (yes, it's completely reasonable that the Sabres don't get out of the first round without elite goaltending in 1999, see @Hockey Outsider in post #198 for why this is the case) and the self-appointed hyperbole police descend immediately, yet you can call Hasek an open quitter in the floweriest language possible all you want and nobody bats an eye.
And here's the thing: At least calling Hasek a quitter makes some sense as a narrative, because it actually exists. Reasonable people can disagree over how much it actually happened, sure, but it's there. Some of this other stuff though has literally nothing at all behind it and seems to pop up again and again. I guess I'm just saying that if this board wants to stop hyperbole, let's maybe actually deal with all hyperbole?
