NEW YORK — Kraken goalie Philipp Grubauer has said consistently after some of his rough outings — and there’ve been a few since the franchise debuted — that hockey is a team game and netminders need to stay even-keeled.
And he wasn’t changing that tune after his latest stellar effort in a Thursday loss to New Jersey either. Grubauer has been on quite a roll, though you’d never know it from the win column because he hasn’t gotten the offensive support from teammates.
Entering play Friday, the Kraken had scored just 2.36 goals per 60 minutes when Grubauer plays, compared to 4.02 when Martin Jones is on the ice. That’s part of the reason Jones took a 23-8-3 record into what became a 6-3 loss here Friday to the New York Rangers while Grubauer sits at 5-9-2 heading into what will likely be a Sunday start in Philadelphia.
But Grubauer — whose .923 save percentage in stopping 24 of 26 shots against the Devils gave him at least .914 or better in his last five outings — wasn’t biting when asked about his uptick in performance.
“It helps when you make those important saves for sure,” he said. “But it’s a team game. You can’t get too high and you can’t get too low. The game is over now and we lost two points. We’ve got a back-to-back and we’ve got to make sure we get the next two and we’re ready to play tomorrow.”
Of course, “tomorrow” came and went with a loss to the Rangers in which Jones seemed to be fighting the puck at times. The underlying numbers for Jones the past month haven’t been nearly as sharp as those for Grubauer, which will inevitably lead some to wonder why it’s Jones continuing to get the bulk of netminding assignments.
Kraken coach Dave Hakstol was asked before Friday’s game about whether he thinks Grubauer’s improved play has come as a result of his decreased workload.
“I don’t really connect the two of those together,” he said. “I see him putting good performances together in all of his starts. And if you look all the way back over his last 10 or 11 starts, you look at his numbers, you look at his performance. And most importantly, you look inside of the numbers at the opportunities he’s given us.
“And I think he did last night [against New Jersey]. He gave us a really good opportunity to win that hockey game but unfortunately when we got the lead, we didn’t hold the lead and we didn’t get that second one for him.”
There was a second part attached to the question that asked Hakstol whether he felt there was room to increase Grubauer’s workload given his solid performances of late. Hakstol either didn’t hear that part or chose not to answer.
In the end, he might not have to answer depending on who plays from here and what happens between the pipes.
Grubauer isn’t just putting up the surface save percentage numbers. The deeper advanced analytics such as Goals Saved Above Expected by the Evolving Hockey website estimates Grubauer has saved 4.6 more goals than “expected” based on shot quality this season.
The bulk of that has come his past nine games, with Grubauer achieving positive analytics in eight of them. The lone exception was a game against Edmonton, where he allowed three goals on the first five shots and was pulled from the game fewer than five minutes in.
Jones, heading into Friday, had allowed 0.33 more goals than “expected” this season and been on the negative side of that equation in five of his last nine contests.
Hakstol, incidentally, declined to fault Jones on any of his five goals allowed on 27 shots by the Rangers, attributing some to some bad bounces off skates and an onslaught of rushes allowed by defenders. Of course, Grubauer could make many of those same claims in some of his less-effective outings.
But Jones, for better or worse, has been winning the majority of his games. And sports being about team wins — reverting back to Grubauer’s original analysis — more so than individual stats means the Kraken netminding debate likely isn’t completely resolved one way or the other just yet.
Notes
- The Kraken went 1-for-5 on the power play against the Rangers, their lone goal coming on a Jared McCann slap shot from the top of the left faceoff circle with his team down by four in the final period. They are now 1-for-9 with the man advantage on this road trip and 1-for-16 their prior five games since a home win over the Vancouver Canucks.
- The Rangers scored a pair of power-play goals in this one, making it four such goals allowed by the Kraken in two nights after previously killing off 18 penalties in a row over an eight-game span.