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Say what you will about forwards scoring and defenders squashing attacking raids, it’s the men between the pipes who usually have the biggest say as far as the outcome of any given hockey game goes.
That counts triple in the Stanley Cup final, and the 2015 goalie match-up is a beauty:
Chicago
Corey Crawford has been to the big dance before. He’s won the big dance before. He has a Stanley Cup championship ring, and knows what it takes to win hockey’s Holy Grail.
Consider that the presumptive starter in Chicago was benched in favour of Scott Darling in the first round of the playoffs, and you realise just how far Crawford has come. Both Hawks goalies gave up huge amounts of goals at varying times during that series against Nashville.
Thankfully for Chicago fans, the jitters that were on show then haven’t returned. Crawford was solid in the sweep of Minnesota and played brilliantly against the ridiculously-talented Anaheim offence. That’s as good a litmus test as there is in hockey at the moment, and when it really counted – Game 7 – Crawford played perhaps his best game.
Coming into the final, Crawford is 9-5 with a .919 save percentage and a 2.56 goals against average. He’s got better with each game, and stopped 65 of 70 shots over the last two games of the Anaheim series to send Chicago to the brink of another championship, but he’s had two games where he let in five or more goals. He’ll have to button down that aspect of his play against Tampa.
Conversely, in the ultra-long overtime contests that were such a big part of the Western Conference finals, Crawford seemed to excel the longer the game went. No Hawks fan wants to discuss the bad run that their goalie was mired in over the last six games of the Western Conference Finals against Los Angeles, where he let in 25 goals total. His porous numbers were part of the reason that the Kings went on to play for – and eventually win – the Stanley Cup in 2014.
On a more personal level, Crawford can etch his name alongside Jonathan Quick of the same Los Angeles Kings who ousted Chicago last year, as the only goalie to win two Stanley Cup championships in the last 14 years.
Let’s not forget that coach Joel Quenneville has a solid back-up in Scott Darling, too, if things go pear-shaped.
Tampa Bay
Not unlike his counterpart down the other end of the ice, Ben Bishop has either been red hot or ice cold – pardon the pun – these playoffs.
At his best he’s been an impenetrable wall, but at his worst he gives up goals like it’s going out of fashion.
Bishop’s run, aside from sticking it to a lot of critics who claimed he wasn’t the guy with whom Tampa could get to the Stanley Cup final, has been historic. He’s the first goalie in NHL history to record road shut-outs in Game 5 and Game 7 in the same series, the first goalie to have shut-outs in each of his first two Game 7 starts, and the first goalie to propel his team into the Cup final by recording a Game 7 road shut-out.
Those are some gaudy, history-making stats, but the downside is that Bishop has given up three goals or more in three of the seven Eastern Conference Final games.
Of course, the fact that he’s managed to bounce back and get his team over the line certainly says something about his resiliency. To that, he is 7-1 with a 1.25 goals-allowed average after a loss the game before.
Overall in the playoffs, Bishop has compiled a 12-8 record with a .920 save percentage a goals allowed average of 2.51.
Advantage: Even. Both goalies have had their great games and their shockers. It’s hard to say who’s better. It’ll come down to, quite simply, which version of each goalie turns up on any given night: good or bad. That’s one of the reasons we’ll see a lot of goals scored in this series.
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