The Disrespect is getting RIDICULOUS...

The disrespect is starting to get a little ridiculous. Wedgwood and Blackwood were the Jennings winning tandem last season and neither one of them are featured in the top 10 at the NHL release this season. This is getting a little bit like I'm sick of seeing this all the time. Avalanche goaltenders are always undervalued. I don't know what the reasoning is behind it and there are some players on this list that have me absolutely baffled. We'll see a little more into that in a little bit before we get started. I just want to remind you guys to subscribe and if you love this content, if you want to see more of this content, let us know. And if you subscribe, just want to let you know, 64% of you are not currently subscribed. 36% of you, thank you very much. You've done a great job, but 64% of you watching, if you want to see more of this, go ahead and hit that subscribe button. We really appreciate it here. I think we're going to try and get to 5,000 subscribers by the end of this season. It's a lofty goal, we know, but we think y'all and us can do it. All right, let's get right into things now. So first things first, we are going to look at the rankings that were released by the NHL. So number one, Andre Vasilevski, not a surprise there. Number two, Connor Helba. After this last season, I think that's insane to put up there. Number three, Igor Shosturkin. I know this last season wasn't great for him either, but he also was on a pretty bad team, so his numbers probably look worse than they actually are. Ilyas Sorokin, okay. Jeremy Sweeman, he was pretty good. Logan Thompson was solid. Ottinger did not have a great year, so I don't entirely understand that one. Vladar had a great season. Walstead had a good season. And Dovis, Jacob Dovis, if that's how you pronounce it, I don't know. But first things first that I see on this list is it's a lot of players that were good years past and not this last season. Now, I know it's top 10 goalies right now, and I'm sure they're taking other seasons into effect, but you've also got to use a little bit of recency bias, because this is probably Connor Helba's worst season of his career at this point, and you're not featuring either one of these lovely beauties here that won the Jennings Trophy together. I know McKenzie Blackwood's numbers are probably not going to be good enough to make this list in any way, shape, or form. This is mostly about Scott Wedgwood not making it there. He also wasn't nominated to be a finalist for the Vezna, which was a little outrageous given the numbers that he had, and he's also not on this top 10 list. Now, for a guy that was arguably a Vezna candidate, not to be on a top 10 the next season is a little bit... that's disrespectful in my opinion. So, here, let's look at these stats. A little more telling of what actually happened and how these goalies did this last year. So, Logan Thompson on top with the most goals saved above expected with 29. Swayman with 28. Sorokin with 25. Vasilevski with 24. Oh, would you look at that? Number five, Scott Wedgwood with 23. Shostakovich with 21, Cooley with 17, and Dovish with the same. Jett Greaves at 16, and Vladar at 13. Here's what I'm going to say about this. There's a big reason that Wedgwood didn't get nominated for a Vezna this last season is they said he didn't carry the same workload that a lot of the other goaltenders did. That's 10 less starts than a lot of the other goaltenders had because, and think about this, 10 more starts, he probably would have had a higher saves above expected than Ilya Sorokin and probably would have been borderline above Swayman and Thompson. If Wedgwood got the starts, I have no doubt that he would have won the Vezna last season. Now, moving on to another thing that a lot of players like to talk about is war. So, this is goalie war last season. If you can't see it very well, I'm sorry, I'm going to get a little bit bigger right here. So, goalie war last season, it's technically kind of a stat on how many games a goalie really stole last season. It's not entirely a perfect statistic, but it's one that is used. So, at the bottom, Joel Hofer at 5.15, Wedgwood up there at eighth with a 5.82, and at the very top is Logan Thompson with nearly a 10 more. If you want to know how important war is, Nathan McKinnon led the league in war last season. Are we surprised? Not really, but now I have a comparison for you. This is a goalie that's on the list and a goalie that's not on the list. If you can tell who it is from the beginning, go ahead, write it in the comments, but we'll get to it at the end that who this actually is, but we have some comparisons here. So, save percentages here. We have 921 save percentage to 895 save percentage. If you could already guess that one of them is Wedgwood. Wedgwood is the one on the left-hand side, and the guy on the right is on the top 10. So, save percentage at 895 last season. High danger is 837 to 809. Mid-range is 937 to 892, and long-range is 975 to 968. So, long-range numbers are fine on both ends, but that mid-range high danger shot position for the right-hand player, that's pretty rough. And on the left side, you can see Wedgwood. Wedgwood was pretty on lock the whole season. I think he did a great job at net last year, and he did great in almost every situation that he had to face. Now, let's look at this. This was the last 10 games of the season for both players. So, 5 on 5 save percentage for Wedgwood was a 927. 5 on 5 save percentage in close situations was 929 to 912. Now, the shots against, and the shots against Persixty are going to be a little bit higher towards the other player because they played more games, and they were also on a team that gave up a lot more shots. So, those are a little different, but if you just look at the last few games, I know the one outlier on Wedgwood's part is that 250 save percentage against Pittsburgh. That was the one where he gave up 3 goals on 4 shots, and they pulled him pretty early. That was a rough game for him. But if you look at the right-hand side, you see a lot of 800s and 700s, and Wedgwood has a lot of 900s on that resume and 2 shutouts in there too, while the other player has only 1 shutout right at the bottom against Vegas. Oh, I guess both shutouts were against Seattle. I didn't even notice that. Oh, and 1 against Dallas. So, we have 3. Wedgwood had 3 shutouts in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8 above 900 save percentage games out of the 10. 833 against Vancouver. That one wasn't great, I know. And that 250 against Pittsburgh, while the other player had 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 above 900, but only 1 shutout. That's the real tiebreaker between those 2. And looking at our last statistic, still the last 10 games I showed on there, but starts above 900. So, for a player that got 10 more starts than Wedgwood, they had 4 less starts above 900, had less than 50% of their games above a 900 save percentage, and 75.6% point percentage. A 2.02 goals against average for Wedgwood versus a 2.86. 2.86 still isn't that bad, but still not great. A 921 save percentage to an 895. So, if you were to compare these 2 over last season, I would like to bet that you think that the player on the left, which is Wedgwood, is the one that is a lot better than the player on the right. Well, NHL Top 10 does not seem to think so. So, it is one of these players on this list. Surprisingly enough, it is actually their number 2 player. This is Conor Hellebuck on the list. Now, I know some people are like, oh, well this list could have to do with playoff performance, and Wedgwood didn't have a great playoff performance. If we're talking about playoff performance, Hellebuck shouldn't be anywhere near this list, because he's probably one of the worst playoff performing goalies that we have seen in the NHL for the last couple of seasons. He has literally either lost them games, or at least not able to keep up. His save percentage in the playoffs is horrendous. We saw that a couple years back when we played Winnipeg in the first round of the playoffs, and they absolutely just crapped the bed. It was really bad. It was hard to watch. Hellebuck was not doing good. Heck, he probably got pulled a couple times. I don't even remember, but the fact that he is number 2 on this list, I would argue that he could be number 8 if we're using the fact that he won the Vezina last year, but he should not be anywhere near the top. I would put Shesterkin at 2, Sorokin at 3, Swainman at 4, Thompson at 5. I would slide in Wedgwood above Ottinger just because last season, Ottinger had like an 890 something or a 900 flat season on save percentage, and goal saved above expected was not very high for Ottinger either. Ladar had a solid season, not a very big sample size. Wohlstedt is a good goalie, but also not great in the playoffs after what we saw against Minnesota this last season. But the disrespect is getting a little, it's getting a little crazy for the Avs out there. We'll see how this next season pans out for our goaltender tandem. We got one more season on Wedgwood's contract. Hopefully he goes superstar again this year. We'd love to see it. I'd love to bring another Jennings trophy back for the Avalanche. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to subscribe, and we'll see you next time.