CrudeRemarks wrote on Thu, 09 December 2021 14:43

RDOilerfan wrote on Thu, 09 December 2021 15:32 Koskinen is one of the most baffling goalies to me. He can look SOOO good than a switch flips and he's brutal. There really doesn't seem to much of a middle ground. It’s not so baffling. He isn’t a starting calibre goaltender. Most NHL backups are capable of good play in short spurts. Honestly he could’ve been the ideal #2 behind Markstrom in a bizarro universe where Peter Chiarelli fired himself instead of tying up all our goaltending cap, causing us to lose out on Markstrom and be forced to sign Father Time.

I think this is one of the most common misconceptions in sports, the idea that bad players in pro sports are just bad, and average guys are average all the time.

The gap between the best players in the NHL (or any league) and the worst regular players is orders of magnitude smaller than the gap between the worst player in the NHL and like a good junior player that never gets drafted.

Any decent backup in the league can give you a string of good to great games. They just can't maintain it for 40-50 games, which is why they're not a starter. Those good games are then balanced out by a string of bad to terrible games. Look at any goalie with a .910 save percentage, their game log is going to have a huge spread in terms of performance. It's not like all of their games are just in the .900 to .920 range.

It's also why a journeyman defenceman like Marek Malik, who never scored more than 7 goals in a season, can score a shootout goal like this on an NHL goalie:



I think I first started to realize this was the case when I found out that a large portion of players in the CFL were All-Americans in the NCAA. Being a really good college player does not remotely mean you're good enough to play in the NFL.

I went to watch a Vancouver Grizzlies game back in the day. Keep in mind the Grizzlies were one of the worst franchises in the history of the NBA, so I was not expecting much. But I remember watching them do their shootaround before the start of the game and they didn't miss. Like at all. And they were just messing around, chatting, whatever. But everything went in. And I realized at that point that my idea that they were terrible basketball players was skewed by watching them play against the best players in the world on a nightly basis. The Grizzlies players were elite athletes (even Big Country ), it was my perception that was off.

[Updated on: Fri, 10 December 2021 11:05]

Oilers Goal Differential
17/18: 234 GF / 263 GA (-29)
18/19: 232 GF / 274 GA (-42)
19/20 (82 game pace): 257 GF / 254 GA (+3) in 64 games
2021 (82 game pace):269 GF / 235 GA (+34) after 38 games