Marc-Andre Fleury Receives Four-Year Extension With Penguins
The Pittsburgh Penguins have extended Marc-Andre Fleury for the next four years
According to NBC’s Pro Hockey Talk, the Pittsburgh Penguins singed Marc-Andre Fleury- their uncontested top netminder since the Stanley Cup win in 2009- to a four year contract extension.
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The extension, worth a reported $23 million, has been met with some mixed reviews around the league.
On the one hand, who were the Penguins going to replace him with? Ilya Bryzgalov and Martin Brodeur are still teamless, but neither seem like much of an upgrade over the inconsistent netminder already sitting in Pittsburgh. The free agency market in 2015 isn’t boasting a whole lot (the highlight of the class seems to be Antti Niemi, if that tells you anything), and all the elite netminders are so solidly locked into their teams that it would take an explosive device to separate them and bring them elsewhere.
While it’s clear that the Penguins may have no other options, though, Fleury doesn’t exactly scream ‘Stanley Cup 2015’ for the Pens. The team is off to a hot start, but the netminder hasn’t had a consistently good season since his 2008-2009 campaign- and in the years since then, his playoff appearances have been disastrous.
Failing to post a save percentage higher than .918 in the decade he’s been around the league, Marc-Andre Fleury is a strange choice for Jim Rutherford to be putting four more years into. One would think that the Penguins would be scrambling and begging at the feet of any team even marginally willing to part with a more consistent netminder- even a young one- in hopes of getting Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin back to the Stanley Cup Final before their prime years are up.
Hopefully, Fleury will shock Pittsburgh and live up to his extension. If not, expect to see that team hit the panic switch- and soon.
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