Goalie talk dominates the playoffs
Travis Green is in with the Senators and Sheldon Keefe is out with the Maple Leafs.
The coaching carousel is in full swing in the NHL, while we’ll have to wait until the end of the playoffs for my favorite musical chair game, the one involving the goalies.
There will certainly be a lot of action on that front as usual, as teams realize that they sink or swim with their masked men between the pipes.
Coaches like Keefe certainly know this better than most: Toronto fired him after a loss in overtime of a seventh game against Boston, on a goal that Sergeï Samsonov should have never allowed. A simple poke check of a puck dumped in from center ice would have been sufficient to prevent David Pastrnak’s goal that sent the Bruins to Florida and Keefe to the firing line, since changing the Leafs’ “core four” of Auston Matthews, John Tavares, Mitch Marner and William Nylander will be difficult, if not impossible.
Of course, Samsonov would not have been the goalie of choice for Keefe if Joseph Woll had been available, but in a cruel twist of fate, he hurt his knee trying to preserve his shutout with 0.1 second left in Game 6 in Toronto.
The whole series was dominated by Jeremy Swayman at the other end of the ice, he who forced his coach Jim Montgomery to ditch his usual rotation with Linus Ullmark (a guy who might be the biggest name in the goalie market this summer).
That was a great story of the first round, but not as great as former Trois-Rivieres Lions goalie Arturs Silovs getting the job done for the Vancouver Canucks after their number one goaltender, Thatcher Demko, was injured in their first game against Nashville, and he had to take over for career backup Casey DeSmith.
A 6th round pick of the Canucks in 2019, Silovs is a national hero in his native Latvia for his role in their upset of the United States in the bronze medal game of the World Championships last year in held in Tampere, Finland, and Riga, Latvia.
He seemed a bit shaky Wednesday night for the first game of the second round series against the Oilers, but not as much as Stuart Skinner at the other end in Vancouver’s come from behind win.
At the time of this writing, the Caroline Hurricanes have decided to make a goaltending change, from Frederik Andersen to Pyotr Kochetkov, for Game 3 of their series against the Rangers. It might not matter as Igor Shesterkin is at the top of his game.
One great thing about these playoffs is that one of my favorite accounts on Twitter/X,
(who is also here on Substack I just found out) is doing more and more hockey/arts connections, like the one he did of Andersen off the great photo at the top of this entry.The guy behind this account never misses, and what is most impressive is that he recalls all the paintings and artworks from having seen them in person, not from using any AI. Wild.
Hopefully, the rest ot the playoffs will give him a lot more opportunities to feature goalies in his artwork.