Darcy Kuemper is keeping the Arizona Coyotes afloat in playoff hunt

The Arizona Coyotes are in the playoff hunt, but their chances are pinned to Darcy Kuemper keeping up his recent run between the pipes.

In a classic revenge game angle, Arizona Coyotes goaltender Darcy Kuemper had 39 saves in a shutout of the Minnesota Wild on Sunday.

It was a big win for the Coyotes, as they are one-point behind the Colorado Avalanche for the second wild card spot in the Western Conference and are now three points clear of the Wild.

Keumper has started 20 straight games for Arizona between the pipes, with a 12-5-3 record and  a .942 save percentage, a 1.78 goals against average and three shutouts over that span.

Two of those shutouts have come in the last three contests, and Kuemper has allowed three goals or fewer in 19 of those last 20 games, including 10 in a row now.

Going back further, to the calendar flipping to 2019, Kuemper is 21-8-6 with a .932 save percentage and a 2.06 goals against average over 35 games. So is this a new level, or an unsustainable hot streak?

Kuemper has five shutouts since the start of January, over the aforementioned 35 games. Over his previous 149 career games (132 starts), he posted 11 shutouts. In 53 games this season, Kuemper is 26-19-8 with a 2.34 goals against and a .924 save percentage.

But a closer look shows some serious chinks in the armor. Via Corsica’s Goals Saved Above Average metric (GSAA), tabulated similarly to WAR in baseball, Kuemper comes in at -0.7 so far this year.

Hockey Reference’s GSAA metric, which is a raw number more than a great measure of value, has Kuemper ranked No. 3 among qualify goalies, behind Ben Bishop and Andrei Vasilevskiy.

Hockey analytics guy Rob Vollman developed a metric called Really Bad Starts (RBS), defined as starting with a save percentage below 85%, and Kuemper has six of those this year.

Vollman also authored Quality Starts for goaltenders, which seems to have its roots in the same metric for pitchers in baseball.

The qualifications are a save percentage above a goalie’s average save percentage for the season, or a save percentage of at least 88.5 percent if a goalie faced 20 or fewer shots. Kuemper has 34 of those in his 53 starts this year, which is good for a quality start rate of 64.2 percent.

Heading into this season, admittedly with generally occasional starts as a backup, Kuemper had a career quality start rate of 47.4 percent.

If the Coyotes don’t finish the job and make the playoffs, and the Avalanche have an extra game left to bolster their advantage, Kuemper’s recent run will be for naught and probably quickly be forgotten.

The power of a hot goaltender is on display though, with Philipp Grubauer following suit in Colorado as a close parallel to Kuemper, and hockey is finally pretty fun again in Phoenix.

But this is the best Kuemper has ever been, and even thought it’s becoming a larger sample size it will stand as clearly the best stretch of his career.