The Flyers ended last season with an .879 team save percentage. This was nearly 10 points below the San Jose Sharks — a team who was openly tanking — for the worst team save percentage in the NHL. It’s comfortably the worst mark since the turn of the century, though this year’s Ottawa Senators (.873) are giving it a real run. The front office then came to the logical conclusion that the roster simply can’t be evaluated correctly if they’re spending their time fishing the puck out of their own net.
So, Danny Briere recruited Dan Vladar, and the evaluation could truly begin. It looked like a shrewd decision from the beginning — Vladar looked like a Vezina dark horse and performed among the league leaders in save percentage in the early parts of the season. The Flyers were winning games. Eventually, his numbers came back down to Earth. He currently sports a slightly above average .905, which is still miles better than anything Philadelphia saw last year, but the team’s results have tanked anyway.
The difference this season, glaringly so, is the team’s inability to score goals. This isn’t a big revelation; the discourse around the center position has been hammering the lack of offense from players like Sean Couturier and Noah Cates for long enough. Those players play good defense, but there’s been many games like the one in Washington on Wednesday night — a 3-1 snoozer with no genuine pushback from the forwards. The ire has shifted sharply from the goaltenders to the centers this season despite the team’s overall save percentage remaining among the league’s worst.
What the numbers say
Per the eye test, Vladar looks like he’s simply carrying the team on his back on a nightly basis. The Flyers don’t score goals, they don’t kill penalties all that well, and they certainly don’t have a viable power play. It’s the Greek myth of Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill for all of eternity. The boulder, in this case the Philadelphia Flyers, is rolling away rapidly from Vladar, and there’s nothing he can do about it.
Vladar has a decent save percentage, and per MoneyPuck’s Goals Saved Above Expected, he’s at a very respectable 9.2 — good for 15th in the league. The Flyers have actually done a pretty good job on defense, as Vladar is ranked 22nd in Expected Goals Against. He’s literally outperforming expectations, but his supporting cast is doing a decent job limiting the high danger opportunities as well. Funnily enough, on those high danger unblocked shot attempts, Sam Ersson’s .804 is considerably better than Vladar at .786.
Yet, Vladar has allowed fewer goals than Ersson despite playing far more often. The only major difference between the two appears to be that Vladar doesn’t often get beat by the easy ones, whereas Ersson ranks near the bottom in low danger save percentage– just ahead of his old tandem-mate, Carter Hart. It wasn’t that long ago that the Flyers relied heavily on those two.
All-in-all, Vladar’s numbers aren’t as special as he looks behind this Flyers team. He’s simply just not the worst goaltender in the league, and it’s been some time since Philadelphia has had genuinely good goaltending. Giving Ersson 25 to 30 starts this season makes the playoffs a tall task, but it’s not certain this would be a playoff team with even a second Dan Vladar as backup. It’s certainly not his fault, but they’ve been losing the games that the first Vladar plays. The rest of the roster just isn’t good enough.
Flashbacks of another Flyer
Good goaltending from a Flyer behind a lackluster group as a whole isn’t unfamiliar; Steve Mason comes to mind pretty quickly. Mason’s numbers were outrageous for a team that never advanced out of the first round. A .917 save percentage in 60 starts in 2013-14 only to lose in seven games to the New York Rangers, a .928 in 48 starts the next year to miss the playoffs entirely, and 53 starts of .918 goaltending to lose to Washington the year after. These were prime Andrew MacDonald years, and the Flyers should do everything in their power to avoid another Mason career arc with Vladar.
The difference here is Vladar has never played that many games in his career. He’s an unproven commodity past the 30 game mark, and he’s appeared a little shaken up, enough to be pointed out on broadcasts by Jim Jackson more than once. It hasn’t hindered his game, but he’s missed time once this year already. As random as goaltending can be, the Flyers will be lucky to get a similar performance out of Vladar next season — one that expectations may rise for with the exciting additions of Porter Martone and Oliver Bonk. They’d be remiss not to address the scoring concerns sooner rather than later while Vladar can still be effective.