NHL Awards Watch: Vezina Trophy
By Tyler Brown
Georges Vezina was a pretty good goalie. These guys are better.
Goaltending is the most important position in hockey. A good team with bad or inconsistent goaltending is going nowhere (here’s looking at you Philly) and a mediocre team with great goaltending is always a threat to steal a game and sneak into the playoffs — just ask Carey Price and last year’s Vezina winner Sergei Bobrovsky.
In order to reward the league’s best goaltenders the NHL’s 31 GMs are tasked with identifying the player “adjudged to be the best at this position”. Before that they just totaled up which team had been scored on the least over the season and called it a day, but now we have the Jennings Trophy for that little bit of calculus.
Vezina winners are generally on a playoff team — the GMs like to reward winners — and they generally start the majority of their teams games and see a lot of rubber coming their way, leading to a high save percentage and a low goals against average. This year five candidates have fit the bill and one of them should be taking home some sparkly new hardware at the season’s end.
Andrei Vasilevskiy (Tampa Bay Lightning)
Tampa Bay has been the class of the East all season long. With the 1-2 scoring punch of Steven Stamkos and Nikita Kucherov lighting up the lamp at a pace that is probably causing staff at Amalie Arena to fret they may run out of red light bulbs before season’s end, the outstanding play of Andrei Vasilevskiy in his first year as Tampa’s clear cut first choice starter has been thoroughly overshadowed.
When Steve Yzerman traded Ben Bishop at last year’s trade deadline there were rumbling that Vasilevskiy wasn’t ready to take on the workload of an NHL starter. He was too young, too inexperienced, too raw. Vasilevskiy silenced the doubters last year with a superb run after the deadline and kept the pace up this year, recording 40 wins in his 56 starts and posting a .925 save percentage and a 2.45 goals against average. With all the surrounding talent in Tampa, GMs might not see the true value of Vasilevskiy’s stellar season, but the stats don’t lie, Vasilevskiy has been one of, if not the, best goaltender in the NHL this season.
Pekka Rinne (Nashville Predators)
Pekka Rinne has a habit of following a weak year with a strong year. Last year was a weak regular season for him where he posted pedestrian numbers and only really turned it on in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, taking the Preds all the way to the finals behind some stellar netminding. With that in mind, this year’s version of Pekka Rinne has been a showstopper from start to finish.
The 35 year old netminder has posted a minuscule 2.28 goals against average through his 50 starts and 37 wins along with a very respectable .928 save percentage. Buoyed by one the strongest defensive cores in the league, some GMs might see Rinne’s success as secondhand and vote accordingly, but the big Finn has been a force to be reckoned with all season and should be considered a strong, if not the leading candidate to take home the hardware at season’s end.
Connor Hellebuyck (Winnipeg Jets)
At the end of last season the Winnipeg Jets were so sure that Connor Hellebuyck was not the starter they were looking for that they went out and acquired Steve Mason from the Philadelphia Flyers to shore up the position. Boy do they regret that move now. Mason has played just 12 games this year after Hellebuyck took over the net with a run of stellar play in November and never looked back, posting 35 wins in 53 starts to go along with his .923 save percentage and 2.39 goals against, rate stats superior to Mason’s in every way.
The Jets finally found the steady hand between the pipes they were searching for in Hellebuyck and he has delivered in the confidence that they have shown in him. With Winnipeg poised to make their triumphant return to the playoffs in 2018, much of the credit for their breakout success can be laid at the feet of the third year pro Connor Hellebuyck who has a high flying future ahead of him with the Jets.
John Gibson (Anaheim Ducks)
Everyone knew John Gibson was going to be a star one day. The rumbling started after his superb showing at the World Junior Championships in 2013 where he was the top goaltender and the tournament MVP. His road to success in the NHL was not an easy one though, Gibson struggled in his first few seasons with the Ducks and was relegated to backup duty in his first two seasons. He found success in the AHL during those years, and then was great last year splitting time with Jonathan Bernier getting an NHL all-star nod and a place on Team North America at the World Cup of Hockey.
Gibson has obviously parlayed that success into confidence this year as he has given the Duck some of the NHL’s best goaltending in 2018. With 25 wins in 50 starts, a .925 save percentage, and a 2.49 goals against average on a fringe playoff team, Gibson has done everything he needs to be considered a top tier option between the pipes and a Vezina candidate.
Tuuka Rask (Boston Bruins)
If the Vezina voting was done in before the calendar flipped over to 2018 Tuuka Rask would not have been on anyones radar. the Bruins were out of the playoffs and looking like they were in line for a great draft choice when something happened. That something was that the Bruins first line started to score like crazy and their goaltending and defense stiffened up to the point that at the moment of this article’s writing they lead the league with a paltry 163 goals scored against.
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Tuuka Rask has been a big part of the B’s success with 27 wins over 42 starts and a .920 save percentage and 2.27 goals against average. With the Bruins the hottest team in hockey since 2018 started it would be hard to deny Rask’s role in the turnabout and harder still to make a case that his year doesn’t put him firmly in contention for the Vezina.