Oscargasm wrote on Thu, 11 February 2021 21:18

WhoreableGuy wrote on Thu, 11 February 2021 22:05 Oscargasm wrote on Thu, 11 February 2021 20:51 My comments about him being what the room needs, is not me making fun of the locker room thing. I legitimately view that as a huge add from him and I truly think he’s the a in the tandem. Oh that wasn’t directed at you at all, I remember your comment the other day and was glad it was posted because I recall seeing posts in a sarcastic way of what Mike Smith brings as a 38 year old goalie. The goalie tandem was very solid last year but we think of 4 games played in 6 days, 4 months after the stoppage. Oh, sorry! I had double the wine I had been drinking during games tonight as the wife wanted a glass with supper, so I indulged as well haha. Excuse my thinking it was sent my way. You’re spot on. They performed well as a tandem last year with the plan Tipp and Co had for their starts. And I think we’ll see that again. The rest will help them both and Smith’s contributions as a motivator will continue to help those in front of him. I know my best friend Adam isn’t a big fan, and Indo see his reasoning. But Smith has been a breath of fresh air for this team and you can’t discount the effect he has on the room. Well, you can, I guess. But you’re wrong if you do It’s 2 games, but I’m glad to see Smith back, he was pretty well on his game this time last season too. Here’s hoping it’s not a flash in the pan and he continues to play calm and consistent. Ps. It probably helps having an actual defense in front of him and not Russell starfishing

I'm happy for Smith. Nice of him to get another win, and a shutout to boot.

That said, just as I don't think Darnell Nurse is going to maintain his goal scoring pace, or that Jujhar Khaira's hot streak has shown that he's finally figured it out and is going to be a consistent contributor from here on out, I don't think we can expect Mike Smith to continue allowing 0-1 goals per game.

It isn't his one extremely bad playoff game against Chicago that I hold against him - although that was atrocious. His save percentage was .902 last year. It was .898 the year before. Those are not small sample sizes - that's over 79 appearances. He started 20 games in the 2020 portion of last season including that playoff game. In those games he was below .900 in eight of them and right on .900 twice more. We won five of those ten games despite his poor stats, so we outscored our problem half of the time. That's probably one of the reasons people don't remember him as bad as he was.

The first half of last season was even worse. 20 starts, 11 games under .900 and one more at .900. The big difference was that we didn't outscore the problem in that part of the season at all...we were 0-12 in when he was at or below .900.

It's not that I'm being mean to Mike Smith - it's just where he's at in his career. He's likely to have more bad games than good. We have a pretty dynamic team, so maybe we'll win sometimes even when he's bad, but we can't count on it, and going in to the playoffs thinking he can win you any rounds, never mind four rounds? That's just fooling yourself, no matter how well he played tonight.

"Thinking that a bad team's best players are the reason the team is bad is the "Tambellini re-signing Lennart Petrell" of sports opinions." @Woodguy55
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