3 goalies the Pittsburgh Penguins can add this offseason

It’s painfully obvious the Pittsburgh Penguins need to upgrade their goaltending this offseason. 

For the third consecutive season, the Pittsburgh Penguins failed to advance past the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. The previous two times, they were outplayed and it was fairly obvious changes had to be made. But this time is different. Hockey is a team sport, but it’s really hard to look at what happened against the New York Islanders and not put most of the blame on goaltender Tristan Jarry.

The Penguins were arguably the better team during the series. They controlled the possession battle, as they had more expected goals, scoring chances, high-danger scoring chances, and shot attempts than the Islanders. Yet the Islanders won.

Ultimately, the series came down to goaltending. Ilya Sorokin was fabulous in goal. The Penguins had 34 high-danger shots on goal against the rookie goaltender and Sorokin stopped all but four of them. He made big saves when he needed to and it’s not a coincidence he was in goal for each of the Islanders four wins.

On the other side of the ice, Jarry was flat out terrible. There’s no nice way to put it. According to Natural Stat Trick, among goalies with at least 200 minutes played in the postseason, Jarry has the second-worst high-danger save percentage, the worst GSAA (goals saved above average), and the lowest save percentage.

The Islanders figured out how to beat Jarry – by channeling their inner Gunner Stahl, getting fancy, and going glove side. Of the 21 goals scored against Jarry this series, 15 of them were glove side.

It’s not like the Penguins needed Jarry to steal the series. They didn’t even need him to be great. All Jarry had to do was be good. And he couldn’t do that. You can’t chalk this up to merely a bad postseason either, as Jarry was inconsistent during the regular season in his first year as the number one goalie.

This feels weird to say because Penguins general manager Ron Hextall holds the record for most career penalty minutes by a goaltender, but Hextall’s a pretty patient, rational general manager. Some other changes need to be made, but those other changes are minor. This should allow the Penguins to put goaltending at the top on their offseason to do list.

Let’s take a look at three strong candidates for the Penguins to add.