A celebration of goaltenders allowing really terrible goals

I’ve always been fascinated by bad goals. You know the kind – the ones where the puck goes in, you immediately start swearing at your TV either out of frustration or amazement, and we get an extended zoom-in on the goaltender while his teammates all turn and skate away in disgust without even acknowledging he exists.

Bad goals have always been a part of hockey, but if anything they’ve become even more interesting over the course of the Dead Puck era. An entire generation of defense-first coaches have worked to squeeze the offense out of the sport, desperately trying to turn every game into a 2-1 slog of blocked shots and neutral zone turnovers. And they’ve mostly succeeded. But every now and then, all that planning goes out the window because some puck that barely seemed worth paying attention to suddenly winds up in the back of the net.

We almost got one for the ages last week in Boston. With the Bruins and Blue Jackets fighting through a crucial overtime, a harmless looking dump-in from center ice suddenly took an unexpected bounce and very nearly slipped past Sergei Bobrovsky. Only a lunging glove save kept the Blue Jackets goalie from being on every highlight reel for the next decade.

The #NHLBruins dump the puck in and it takes a funky bounce, but Bobrovsky makes the save #CBJ pic.twitter.com/YVFVIilbj9

— Shayna (@hayyyshayyy) April 28, 2019

So close. But don’t worry, bad goal fans. There’s still lots of playoffs left to add a few entries to the list. It’s only a matter of time.

In the meantime, let’s get organized. Here are 10 types of terrible goals that are all sorts of fun to see, as long as you’re not a goaltender.

Type 1: The long-distance bouncer

This is the one that nearly got Bobrovsky. Somebody lobs one in from center ice, it takes a few bounces, and suddenly everyone realizes that the goalie is in trouble.

Victims of the long-distance bouncer include Sebastien Caron and Cam Talbot, but they’re not alone; we see one of these a few times a season. And of course, there’s the most famous example of them all, the one you were probably thinking about as soon as you saw the headline on this post …

Here’s the thing: These shots are way tougher than they look. I’m not even entirely convinced we should call them bad goals. Pucks aren’t designed to bounce in a predictable way, and if you can land one just right in front of a goalie, they basically have no choice but to get as big as they can and hope the hockey gods are on their side. And every now and then, they’re not.

Put it this way: There’s no save that has a higher degree of difficulty and a lower level of sympathy if you fail. We don’t expect goalies to be able to adjust and make saves on shots that were deflected by a skate or a stick right in front of them. But when the ice is doing the deflecting, there’s no mercy.

If I was in the NHL, I’d be taking these shots all the time. I’d be staying late and practicing them, trying to get them to land in just the right spot and with just enough spin. Honestly, it might be my shootout move.

Type 2: The long-distance boomer

The more-advanced cousin of our first type of bad goal, this one looks like a much tougher save even though it probably shouldn’t be. There’s no bounce or deflection here, just a guy winding up from long range and straight-up drilling it.

We can get into a bit of a gray area here; personally, I’d argue that Steve Yzerman’s laser beam winner against Jon Casey back in 1996 wasn’t a bad goal at all, but rather one of the greatest shots in hockey history. But Owen Nolan’s bomb from center ice a few years later? Yeah, that’s a bad goal.

Dan Cloutier never really lived down giving up a crucial playoff goal to Nicklas Lidstrom back in 2002, although that one’s on the borderline of Type 1 and Type 2 because Lidstrom skipped it. Other Canucks goalies haven’t had that excuse, although at least that one didn’t come in the playoffs. But they can happen to the best of them and even show up in the middle of some of the great goaltending runs of all-time.

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What was the most unexpected final four in NHL playoff history?

It’s​ been the year​ of​ the​ wildcard​ in​ the​ NHL playoffs.​ The Hurricanes are​ already through to​ the​ conference final, having​​ knocked off the Metro’s top two seeds along the way. The Dallas Stars have a chance to head to the Western final if they can win tomorrow night’s Game 7. And the Blue Jackets and Avalanche are still alive in their quests to win divisions they aren’t even in.

It’s all added up to a postseason that’s been, to borrow a technical hockey term that the insiders use, “weird-ass.” And if all four wildcard teams make it through to the conference finals, it would be safe to call this year the most unpredictable postseason we’ve ever seen. It wouldn’t even be all that close.

But even if a few of the favorites survive, this season will still have a solid claim to the “most unpredictable” crown. Today, let’s take a look back through the history books and try to figure out which other seasons are in the running.

There are a few ways you could do this, including just trying to remember which years felt the most surprising. But that’s tricky because hockey fans are good at fooling ourselves into thinking we knew more than we did. Instead, let’s stick with something objective.

I went back through all the postseasons since the league went to a full sixteen-team format in 1979-80 and looked at where each of the final four teams finished in their conference standings. If they had the best record, they get one point. The second best is two, down through to the team with the eighth-best record among playoff teams in the conference. Add those four scores up and you’ve got a pretty decent idea of just how unlikely that season’s conference finalists were.

The highest possible score would be 30, from two sevens and two eights. If all this year’s wildcards make it through, that would give this season an unpredictability score of 29. (The Stars were a wildcard but actually had the sixth-best record in the West, ahead of Vegas.) It won’t surprise you to know that that would be the highest score ever by a wide margin. But what if the three remaining favorites all make it through? That drops us down to a seven (Carolina), five (St. Louis) and a pair of twos (Boston and San Jose), for a total of 16. Still not bad.

Not bad, but not the best. I could find ten seasons that could beat that total, which seems like a good place to draw the line. Let’s revisit some of those other seasons that left us scratching our heads and trashing our brackets, as we work our way up to the highest score.

1988-89

The final four: Calgary (1), Chicago (8), Montreal (1), Philadelphia (7), giving us a total of 17 points.

The path there: This was a weird year, with two top seeds that finished miles ahead of the pack and that everyone expected to see in the conference final and then two longshots who both made unexpected runs. The Flyers’ push wasn’t all that shocking; they’d been a decent team during the season and only had to navigate a lukewarm Patrick Division and they’d been to the Cup final in 1985 and 1987. But the Hawks had finished with just 66 points before knocking off the Wings and Blues to win the typically terrible Norris.

Fair warning: For reasons I’m not quite clear on, the Hawks show up in these seasons a lot.

The epilogue: Do you believe in miracles? No? Good, because the Flames and Canadiens both advanced, giving us a rare Cup final between the league’s two top teams. The Flames won that one in six.

2009-10

The final four: San Jose (1), Chicago (2), Philadelphia (7) and Montreal (8), for a total of 18 points.

The path there: This might have been one of the first seasons that popped into your mind when you saw the premise for this piece. And rightly so, since it’s the only season (until maybe this year) when one conference saw its two worst playoff teams by regular season record meet in the conference final. The Flyers and Habs were both big underdogs who wrote stunning playoff stories, Montreal on the strength of Jaroslav Halak’s red-hot goaltending and Philadelphia by coming back from down 3-0 to stun the Bruins.

Unfortunately for our rankings, while all that was going on the West played out exactly as expected, with the top two teams rolling through the early rounds. Therefore, this season won’t rank as high on our list as it probably deserves to.

The epilogue: Halak’s magic dried up and the Flyers won the battle of the underdogs. But they couldn’t finish the story against the Hawks, who swept the Sharks and then ended their 49-year Cup drought with Patrick Kane’s overtime winner. It was a fittingly weird end to an unpredictable postseason.

1991-92

The final four: Pittsburgh (4), Boston (6), Chicago (3) and Edmonton (6), for a total of 19 points.

The path there: This one looks more surprising on paper than it felt at the time. The Bruins/Penguins conference final was a rematch of the year before, so not exactly a shocker there. The Oilers had won five of the last eight Cups, so even in the post-Gretzky era, it wasn’t that stunning to see them advance. And the Hawks were a decent enough team.

Still, the 1992 postseason marked the first time in the 16-team era that neither conference sent a top-two team to the final four. And even in the pre-loser point days, it was at least a little bit odd to see that none of the four finalists even cracked 90 points.

The epilogue: This may have been the worst final four of all time. Both conference finals ended in sweeps, and then the final did too, with Mario Lemieux and the Penguins knocking off the Hawks to win their second straight Cup.

1981-82

The final four: Vancouver (4), Chicago (7), the Islanders (1) and Quebec (7), a total of 19 points.

The path there: It was the Kings who did the heavy lifting here, knocking out the powerhouse Oilers in the first round thanks to the Miracle on Manchester. That opened a path for the 77-point Canucks, who lost just once while knocking out the Flames and Kings. The Nordiques knocked off the heavily favored Habs and then survived the Bruins, while the top-seeded Islanders handled their business. Meanwhile, the 72-point Hawks only had to escape the Norris, which they did by knocking off the North Stars and Blues.

The epilogue: This was the mid-dynasty Islanders of Al Arbour, Mike Bossy, Denis Potvin and Bryan Trottier, so when they arrived in the conference finals to find all these scrappy underdogs waiting for them, they probably weren’t too worried. They shouldn’t have been; they didn’t lose a game the rest of the way while rolling to their third straight Cup.

2005-06

The final four: Anaheim (6), Edmonton (8), Carolina (2) and Buffalo (3), giving us another 19-point total.

The path there: This is another memorable postseason that you might expect to have higher on the list. You could make a case that it should be, since the Sabres were technically the four-seed in the East because of the three-division format. But they had the conference’s third-best record, so they earn three points towards our total. And the Hurricanes only contribute two, because while most fans seem to remember their Cup win being a big surprise, they were actually a really good team that year, racking up 112 points.

But the real action was in the West, where the Oilers shocked the 124-point Wings in a first-round in which all four underdogs advanced. If you wanted to call the 2006 West the craziest playoff year that any one conference has ever seen, I wouldn’t argue with you. But the East was relatively straightforward, so they bring down the overall total.

The epilogue: The Oilers dispatched the Ducks fairly quickly, while the Hurricanes barely held off the Sabres. That left us with a Carolina/Edmonton final that gave us one of the worst-timed injuries ever, Gary Bettman’s most awkward Cup handoff and the start of a decade of darkness.

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Grab Bag: In defense of Brad Marchand, pucks in the netting and Gary Bettman’s 2000 replay thoughts

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- I try to think of a dozen nice things to say about Brad Marchand
- Thoughts on last night's puck-in-the-netting review controversy
- An obscure player with quite the Game Seven resume
- The week's three comedy stars, featuring one of the most brutal tweets of all time
- And we got back nearly 20 years to hear a young Gary Bettman make the case against more replay

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Puck Soup: Sucker punches, dives and other playoff fun

In this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- The Hurricanes are on the verge of a trip to the conference final
- Should Brad Marchand have been suspended?
- The good and bad of this year's NHL award nominations
- An interview with LA Kings voice and potential new Jeopardy host Alex Faust
- How big a problem is diving?
- We get to react in real time to breaking news in Vegas and women's hockey
- Gary Bettman's latest public appearance
- Remembering Jason Botchford
- And more...

>> Stream it now:

>> Or, subscribe on iTunes.

>> Get weekly mailbags and special bonus episodes by supporting Puck Soup on Patreon for $5.

The Hart Trophy should be based on both the regular season and the playoffs (so let's repossess a few trophies)

The​ NHL revealed the​ three​ finalists​ for​ the​ Hart​ Trophy for​ league MVP on​ Sunday, and there​ were​ no major surprises.​​ The honors went to Nikita Kucherov, Connor McDavid and Sidney Crosby, with everyone expecting that Kucherov will end up as the winner.

Given how voters typically treat the award, those finalists seem about right. It’s a bit of a surprise to see McDavid in the final three since his team didn’t make the playoffs, which seems to be a deal-breaker for many voters. But I had all three on my ballot, along with Johnny Gaudreau and Patrick Kane. So sure, Kucherov, Crosby and McDavid are worthy picks.

But they have something else in common: None of them won a playoff round this year. In fact, none of them even won a game.

That’s apparently the first time that’s ever happened, but it’s not far off from last year, when the top three were Nathan MacKinnon, Anze Kopitar and eventual winner Taylor Hall. None of them made it out of the first round either, as they combined for a grand total of three playoff wins. Go back through the history of the award, and this sort of thing isn’t rare. That’s because the voting is done immediately after the regular season ends, before we know how the playoffs turn out. And often, they don’t turn out very well for the Hart finalists.

Is that a problem? Maybe not, but it highlights an oddity about how we vote for the Hart. Modern voters have apparently decided that only players who make the postseason can ever be the league’s move valuable player; Mario Lemieux in 1988 was the last non-playoff participant to take home the trophy, and even being a finalist is exceedingly rare. That’s because, as it’s been explained to me, the postseason is what matters. You can rack up all the numbers you want, but if they don’t get your team into the playoffs, it was all meaningless.

But then we do the voting before the first round starts, when we have no idea if that all-important playoff berth will amount to anything. It’s a weird place to draw the line. Kucherov didn’t just have a quiet playoffs, after all, with no goals and only two points – he actively hurt his team by taking a suspension for a must-win game. And yet he’s almost certainly going to run away with the Hart voting, while guys like Kane and McDavid get left off many ballots entirely because we’re told that the playoffs are all that matter.

It’s not wrong, necessarily. Just strange. Pick a lane, you know?

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