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The trashing and scapegoating of Ilya Bryzgalov over the past year has been carried to such ridiculous proportions that I think a little counterweight is in order to present a more realistic and balanced picture both of his 2011-12 season and prospects moving forward.
No one would tell you that Bryzgalov had the type of season that the team hoped to see. He was extremely inconsistent, sometimes within the same game. He was brilliant in early October and throughout the month of March. Otherwise, you never knew what you were going to get from game to game, period to period and even shot to shot.
Throughout the season, Bryzgalov was guilty of some appalling lapses of concentration. There were too many times he could have made saves by simply having his stick along the ice or tracking the puck a little better. His puckhandling at times was adequate and other times was atrocious.
Then again, there were also plenty of times where Bryzgalov saved the team's bacon. What you saw at the start of the season in the month of March was that when the players in front of him collectively committed themselves to team defense, he was capable of performing on par with the best goaltenders in the league.
The truth of the matter was that the Flyers' team defense both in the regular season and playoffs was as streaky and inconsistent as the goaltending the club received. In hockey, these two things walk hand in hand. When one is out of synch for long enough, it inevitably drags the other down with it over time.
There were many times where Bryzgalov played very well but ended up with a mediocre-looking stat line because the team in front of him didn't do its job. This was especially true in much of the playoff series against New Jersey, especially Games 2, 3 and 4. On the flip side, there were plenty of games in the regular season (several against the Rangers leap to mind) where the team D was fine until Bryzgalov let in multiple soft goals and then everything else collapsed in the third period after the offense had kept the team in games.
Meanwhile, the goalie was the victim of a lot of sheer bad luck, especially in the first half of the season. Anecdotal evidence isn't evidence at all, but I can hardly recall seeing a run of games with as many pinball-like deflection goals as during the team's struggles in late October and mid-to-late December. Most of them were unstoppable for any goalie. However, I would have liked to have seen the entire team -- including its goaltender -- do a better job of shaking off such goals and getting right back on track.
There are numerous other issues that I think need to raised in the name of fairness and balance, especially in regards to putting Bryzgalov's much-maligned playoff run in their proper context:
1) The easy out is always to give the goalies too much blame in defeat and too much credit in victory. That is often a much easier storyline to peddle in lieu of actual analysis.
2) Bryzgalov sustained a chip fracture in his right foot in late March and there is no way it was even close to fully healed when he returned to the ice barely a week later. I understand that injuries are not an excuse for poor performance but they also need to be taken into consideration. In the Pittsburgh playoff series in particular, Bryzgalov was having problems pushing off the bad foot and moving laterally and the Pens caught on during their power plays as the series progressed. He looked closer to being healthy in the New Jersey series.
3) Games 1-4 of the Pittsburgh series was atypical hockey for the playoffs. It was sheer firewagon hockey, and no goalie in the NHL would have done well statistically in that series. I'm not saying that Bryzgalov or Marc-Andre Fleury were not their own worst enemies at times -- they certainly were -- but there were a lot of highly skilled forwards on both sides who were often allowed free reign.
4) Bryzgalov may have bent but he didn't break in the first three games of the Penguins series. Over the latter 40+ minutes of Game 1 and final period of Game 2 in Pittsburgh, he was tested plenty of times and came up with the "momentum saves" the club needed. The early scoring onslaughts by Pittsburgh in the first two games gave way to a lot of frustration for their shooters with the games still on the line despite Philadelphia's comebacks. In the Game 6 clincher, Bryzgalov received stellar team D and had a relatively easy game but he also upheld his end of the bargain.
5) Bryzgalov's play in the second periods of Games 2 and 4 of the New Jersey series, especially the former, was exactly the type of "goalies need to steal a few games in the playoffs"performance that so often gets talked about. Bryzgalov was truly the only reason why the Flyers took a 1-0 lead into the third period of Game 2 and remained down by only a single goal after 40 minutes of Game 4. At some point, any goalie in the NHL needs the team in front of him to start helping out. The help never arrived in those games.
6) There were two goals in the New Jersey series where Bryzgalov was partially or fully to blame. One was Petr Sykora's game-tying goal in the third period of Game 1 (forgotten soon thereafter because the Flyers won the game in OT). The other was the fateful giveaway to David Clarkson in Game 5. Otherwise, it's really hard to look at any goals New Jersey scored in that series and truthfully pin them on the Philadelphia goalie.
I would argue that, over the balance of the Devils series, Bryzgalov looked LESS beatable than Martin Brodeur. New Jersey's relentless forechecking and limitation of Philly's operating space resulted in Brodeur facing much more sporadic scoring chances. The Flyers simply couldn't get to test Brodeur often enough.
Can Bryzgalov win the playoffs? Of course he can. He's perfectly capable of getting hot at the right time in any given season and, if the team around him also executes, then he'll go deep in the playoffs. If not, he won't. To paraphrase something that Bernie Parent once told Pelle Lindbergh, if a goalie can win in the regular season, he can also win in the playoffs. Any talk otherwise is nonsense, because hockey always comes down to the team, whether it's in the fall, winter or spring.
While I strongly prefer to focus only on the on-ice aspects of Bryzgalov's season, no discussion of the player is complete without at least touching on the player's personality, relationship with the media, teammates, coaches and the Philadelphia fans. It is an extremely complicated and convoluted to topic but I will do my best to address it as completely and fairly as possible.
I think there is plenty of blame to go around for what transpired over the past year. There were distractions galore, many of Bryzgalov's own making, some created (or exacerbated) by some media members who focused too much on personality and not enough on hockey performance. In addition, the Flyers' organization ultimately did itself no favors by trying to be overly controlling of what the player was "allowed" to say and how long outsiders would have access to him. Instead of making it all go away, the situation festered and lingered throughout the regular season.
The good news is that, generally speaking, most of these sorts of issues tend to fade to irrelevance when the team is winning and the player himself is doing well. It should also be said that there was undoubtedly some culture shock to the type of fan pressure and media attention that the Flyers receive locally as compared to his experiences in Anaheim and Phoenix as well as his pre-NHL career in Russia.
Frankly, it should make zero practical difference if Bryzgalov has a warm and friendly relationship with the media or a cold and distant one. Whether the goalie laughs and jokes around with reporters afterwards or glowers and stonewalls even the most innocuous of questions does not call for constant micro-analysis of the player's current psyche. Much of it is all a show anyway.
I think the most truthful thing that Bryzgalov said during his 24/7 segments was that he is a man who rarely reveals his true self to anyone but his immediate family. He doesn't let too many people get close enough to him to know who he really is.
The goalie appears to be someone who plays up a persona for the media, whether it's the easy-going quipster, the goofy guy contemplating the universe or the miserable man who won't even crack a smile in the midst of shattering a club shutout record. He tries to put up another persona for his teammates and coaches.
Next year, there won't be any HBO 24/7 cameras to worry about. I can't speak to how much of a distraction the program -- and the public/media response to Bryzgalov's segments -- was to the player or to his teammates. But I will say this. Whatever distraction there was in December to early January should have been long gone within a few weeks.
From a media standpoint, there was a lingering effect in the way some approached their dealings with the goalie. Bryzgalov was semi-permanently cast as the oddball with his head in the cosmos and some seemed almost obsessed with getting him to say something funny or odd. Again, though, you have to understand that colorful soundbites and strong personalities are what sell.
If the team is winning regularly and he's playing well, Bryzgalov's pysche is fine. If the club is losing and/or he hasn't been playing up to par, he OUGHT to be unhappy or, rest assured, his teammates will be unhappy with him.
From the team perspective -- and that is all that should really matter -- Bryzgalov's only concerns should be to stop the puck and recognize that everyone else in the locker room WANTS to rally around him but also have the right to expect the same wholehearted commitment in return. The rest is all ancillary.
Bryzgalov's sideshow spectacle before the Winter Classic appeared to be intentionally orchestrated by the goalie to put both goalie coach Jeff Reese and head coach Peter Laviolette in awkward positions. He may have been smiling and joking about the "good news" of being benched for the game, but his actions appeared to be driven by hurt feelings. He was embarrassed, so he sought to embarrass his coaches.
At times this past season, there were rumors around the team that Bryzgalov is not enamored of Reese's hands-on style as a goalie coach. It should be noted that, around the league and the Flyers organization, Reese is one considered one of the NHL's better goalie coaches.
Hockey people not affiliated with the Flyers have told me that if there is a problem between the two, it's not for lack of coaching ability on Reese's part. The player also has be willing to receive to some constructive criticism, take advice and then adapt the elements that are useful.
There were also two instances in which Bryzgalov publicly threw teammates under the bus. In one instance, he put a specific teammate (Braydon Coburn) in a real awkward position by blaming him for a costly communication mixup in an early-season loss against St. Louis. In the other, he passed the buck about some frustrating recent goals by saying the team in front of him needed to block more shots.
Mind you, there needs to be a little bit of context to these situations. First of all, the quotes came after he'd been asked the same question several times. Each time, Bryzgalov gave a different answer, progressively going from safe and bland replies to more colorful and critical ones.
Guess what? It's still no excuse. It is reporters' jobs to probe deeper into a subject and repeat questions in a more specific, pointed way if the initial query doesn't get a satisfactory response. It's not their job to try to protect a subject or work in a sports team's best interests.
Of course, it's also the prerogative of the subject to repeat the same answer. Left to his own devices, Bryzgalov tends to change course with his answers. In fact, most of his most infamous utterances this past season -- excluding the ones on 24/7 --- came about as a result of being asked the same question numerous times.
The "lost in the woods" comment also had a context to it. It came about following the team's 9-8 loss to Winnipeg in which Bryzgalov entered the game to replace an ineffective Sergei Bobrovsky and fared no better. Bryzgalov had recently caught heat for putting Coburn on the spot and this time around, he appeared to be trying to put all the blame on himself instead.
At first Bryzgalov gave several short, measured answers to questions. Suspecting that the player was deliberately holding back, Tim Panaccio told Bryzgalov he was "being boring" that night. After protesting "What do you want me to say?" Bryzgalov then went off on his self-deprecating monologue.
Eventually, the Flyers decided (rightly or wrongly) that Bryzgalov was spending too much time worrying about the cameras and microphones and not enough time worrying about the stopping the puck. Again, though, that was born of the team and player performing inconsistently on the ice. No one minded the first week to 10 days of the season, when Bryzgalov opened the year by holding Boston to one goal, shutting out the Devils and then nailing down a win against the Canucks.
At any rate, there appears to be a negative perception of Bryzgalov as a teammate by many players around the league.
Former Coyotes teammates Derek Morris and Adrian Aucoin came off as rather petty and classless in ripping Bryzgalov after he left Phoenix and saying that most everyone was glad he was gone. The goalie himself never said anything but positive things about his time in Phoenix, nor did he ever utter a public word about not liking this or that ex-teammate.
Apart from gamesmanship -- the Coyotes were about to play the Flyers and the Phoenix players also wanted to praise their new goaltender Mike Smith -- there was little to be gained. The gamesmanship failed, as the Flyers won both meetings with Phoenix. Besides, Bryzgalov's play in 2009-10 (when he was a Vezina finalist) and 2010-11 had a lot to do with the underdog Coyotes success.
More recently, Nashville Predators forward Martin Erat gave a rather bizarre interview in which he understandably praised teammate Pekka Rinne but also specifically singled out Bryzgalov as a goalie whom he would have difficulty feeling confidence in as a teammate. Much of it was apparently based on Bryzgalov's perceived lack of in-game concentration and general lack of bonding within the locker room, although Erat noted that he has never played on the same team as Bryzgalov and can't speak with certainty.
Should Bryzgalov be worried about outside perceptions? Absolutely not. Should he be worried about the perceptions of his current teammates? In terms of stopping pucks and giving the club a chance to win, absolutely. In terms of winning a popularity contest, there's no need.
Last but not least, we come to the subject of Bryzgalov's contract. There is little doubt that Ed Snider's public edict a year ago about solving the "goalie problem" once and for all ended up putting Paul Holmgren in a bit of a tough spot. The Flyers coveted Bryzgalov so much that they basically weakened their own negotiating position and probably ended up paying MORE rather than less by trading for his rights and using their exclusive negotiating window to keep him off the open market (which, as it turned out was a rather limited market for goaltenders).
But what's done is done. Bryzgalov can't worry about playing up to his contract. He can only worry about giving his team the best possible chance to win.
I'll conclude with this: The complaints about Bryzgalov's salary cap hit and contract length were largely muted in good times and then started up again at the first sign of trouble. Now that LA has won the Cup, the Flyers are popular targets for ridicule about the chain of events tied at least in part to clearing cap space to absorb Bryzgalov's cap hit.
Funny, but I wasn't hearing much in March about what a genius Dean Lombardi is and what a fool Holmgren is. No one was tweeting pseudo-witty quips about Bryzgalov or his contract in the second intermission of Game 2 of the Devils series when, courtesy of Bryzgalov, the team found itself one good period away from taking a 2-0 lead in the series.
It's very easy to jump on and off the bandwagon at will, but doing so means you can't fully appreciate the entire ride. Hockey fortunes can change in a hurry for good or for bad.
The ride with Bryzgalov is never going to be a totally smooth one, but as long as the end result one of these years is a parade down Broad Street no one will care. Well, at least not until the team's next losing skid the following season.
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Congratulations to Claude Giroux for being voted as the NHL player who will appear on the cover of EA Sports' NHL '13 game. It's not a huge deal, but it's a nice little way to recognize his full emergence as one of the premier players in the NHL. The voting also shows just how rabid the Flyers fans are in showing their support nationally.
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Twenty years ago yesterday, the Quebec Nordiques made a handshake agreement with the Flyers on trade for the rights to Eric Lindros, then changed their minds and agreed to trade package offered by the Rangers. Ten days later, on June 30, 1992, arbitrator Larry Bertuzzi awarded Lindros to the Flyers.
The Flyers' trade: Mike Ricci, Peter Forsberg, Steve Duchesne, Kerry Huffman, Ron Hextall, 1992 1st Rounder, 1993 1st Rounder (Jocelyn Thibault), 1994 1st Rounder (transferred to Washington, Nolan Baumgartner) and $15 million cash.
The Rangers' trade: Alexei Kovalev, Doug Weight, Tony Amonte, John Vanbiesbrouck, Sergei Nemchinov, 1993 first round pick, 1994 first round pick and $12 million cash.
Because the disputed trade took place simultaneously with the 1992 Draft, the Flyers had to make their seventh overall pick with the selection they thought they was going to the Nordiques. They chose Ryan Sittler.
During the subsequent arbitration hearings, the Nordiques said they would not have selected Sittler with that pick and wanted other compensation. As a result, Bertuzzi's final ruling removed the pick used for Sittler and substituted Flyers 1990 2nd round pick Chris Simon instead.
Incidentally, according to Jay Greenberg's Full Spectrum book, the Nordiques originally insisted on Rod Brind'Amour -- rather than the rights to prospect Forsberg -- being part of the Lindros package. They wanted Brind'Amour and Russian prospect Slava Butsayev and ultimately agreed to drop that demand if the Flyers would include both Mike Ricci and Forsberg.
Whenever those "what if the Flyers hadn't made the Lindros trade" hypothetical scenarios come up, I always wonder instead about the team with Lindros and Forsberg as the top two centers rather than Lindros and Brind'Amour. Ultimately, though, I still think the club would have come up a bit short of the Cup if the rest of the roster had been the same.
Even if they hadn't made the Lindros trade, the Flyers still would have needed to overall the defense in the early to mid-1990s to re-surface as contenders by 1995. The loss of offensive defenseman Duchesne and struggling former 1st-round pick Huffman in the Lindros trade really mattered little in the big scheme of things.
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Last night, New York Rangers' goalie Henrik Lundqvist became the second Swedish goaltender to win the Vezina Trophy. The first, of course, was the late Pelle Lindbergh in 1984-85.
In the summer of 1985, Lindbergh recorded an interview for Hockey Night in Canada aboard his boat in the waterways around Stockholm. At the end, he was asked how he'd be remembered in 20 years and how he'd react if and when another Swedish goalie won the Vezina someday.
Said Lindbergh, "If there’s really anyone who remembers me in 20 years it will probably be because there’s some new Swedish super goalie who wins the Vezina Trophy. …Maybe there will be some old players who remember that I was the first European goalie to win the Vezina. But I don’t think anyone will remember me in 20 years."
Twenty seven years later, it is fitting that Lundqvist has become the second to win the most prestigious goaltending award in the hockey world. He is easily the most simultaneously talented and charismatic goalie to come out of Sweden since Pelle.
Several clips from the 1985 HNIC interview are interspersed in this retrospective profile of Lindbergh narrated by Al Meltzer.
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As we continue the countdown to the NHL Entry Draft, I have authored a pair of articles focused on looking at non-first draft picks.
For the Flyers Official Site, I wrote an article breaking down the numbers of first-round and non-first picks on the current rosters of the Flyers and other NHL teams, with a particular emphasis on non-first rounders who have gone on to become impact players in the NHL. The article should be posted today.
Over at NHL.com, this week's Across the Pond focuses on six Finnish sleepers available in the 2012 NHL Draft. The article went online yesterday.
Over the course of Friday and Saturday, I will post morning blogs related to the Draft and then update the blog as the Flyers make selections and/or roster moves.
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Special thanks to Brian Startare for having me as a guest on his program on WIP/WYSP late last night.
It's always fun to talk hockey with Brian.
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