I know that people will read the title of this article and smirk. Some will chuckle, laugh, call me a homer, etc.. Ladies and gentlemen, I am no homer – I’m a realist, and the realest thing between the pipes right now in the NHL is 33-year-old Ottawa Senators goaltender Craig Anderson.
While I could whip out statistics to back my claim, like Anderson’s SV% (.951, 1st in NHL), GAA (1.72, 2nd among starting goaltenders), I won’t.
What Anderson does bring in net is personality, something that’s been lacking amongst the NHL’s goalie corps in the post-Roy era. While he is certainly no Dominik Hasek, Anderson has a tendency to be more active and jumpy in his crease than most butterfly-era goaltenders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rDexdfs2jM
Case in point, five nights ago against the Detroit Red Wings’ Tomas Jurco. Anderson made 31 saves on the evening and led his team to a victory they didn’t deserve in the final forty minutes of play (that’s beside the point).
What’s incredible about Anderson is the workload he is facing. With his team giving up, on average, 35.5 shots per night (28th in the NHL, better than only Colorado and Buffalo), Anderson is averaging a tidy 34 saves per game this season. Those are ‘Roberto Luongo in Florida the First Time’ numbers, yet somehow the Senators’ record sits at a very respectable 7-3-3. How? Anderson.
The veteran netminder broke into the NHL with some bad teams; the Florida Panther and Colorado Avalanche teams of the late-2000’s were nothing to brag about, but they did have something in common with the modern-day Sens: a lack of elite-level offense. The ’08-’09 Panthers, led in scoring by Stephen Weiss with just 61 points, nearly snuck into the playoffs with Anderson starting a career-high 31 games in net. The 09′-’10 Avs, who aside from Paul Stastny lacked much offensive punch, snuck into the playoffs on the back of Anderson’s .917 SV% in 71GP.
The underlying theme in all of this is that Craig Anderson is not only used to facing 30+ shots on teams that don’t produce a whole lot offensively, he’s used to making those teams substantially better than their offensive numbers indicate.
While he is without a doubt a Top-5 statistical goaltender in today’s NHL, it’s Anderson’s style of play that brings out the nostalgia in me. Whether it be the two-pad stack on a cross-crease pass, or his general flopping on rebounds, he represents something fresh that I, as a former goaltender, appreciate – something unique. From the age of seven or eight, young goaltenders are drilled into becoming Patrick Roy prototypes – butterfly this, butterfly that. Yet Anderson has managed to retain some of his frantic movement for years at the NHL level, and is arguably the single NHL starting goaltender that best embodies the term ‘hybrid’ goaltender. Yes, he can do the butterfly and ‘get big’, but he is above all a competitor. That’s not to say that other NHL goaltenders aren’t – of course they are – I’m just saying that Anderson’s never-say-die attitude, his over-challenging of shooters, have endeared him to not only me, but a generation of older goaltenders.
He is now the torch-carrier for hybrid goalies everywhere, fighting the tidal wave of butterfly goaltending that’s swept across North America – but he still has a little bit of Hasek in him.
Cheers to you, Craig Anderson, for being different and – most importantly, of course – being damn good.
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