This is not, surprisingly, about the goals themselves.

The goals are awful, obviously. They're the epitome of the Marc-Andre Fleury-est of playoff performances: Misplay the puck behind the net, give up a critcial tying goal into a gaping 24-square-foot cage to complete a comeback of not one, not two, but three goals. Then you fan on a routine wrister from the line in overtime.

Now your team's series is tied two games to two and you're feeling like the reason why. Very familiar territory.

And still the defenses are rallied. This is a Cup-winning goalie, they say. Look at the all-time playoff wins and losses, they say. Everyone else has been bad as soon as the team gets up a few goals, they say. He played great right up until he conceded those two awful, typical goals, they say.

All of that isn't necessarily untrue. Fleury won a Stanley Cup (five years ago), he's won more playoff games than he's lost (by 11), the Penguins aren't playing very well (because they're not very good), and he did play well in Game 4 (before he gave up two crap goals in 3:13 to lose his team the game).

But let's not act like this isn't a problem, or like we couldn't have seen it coming from miles down the road.

There comes a time when everyone has to acknowledge the simple and uncomfortable truth about Fleury: He's a decidedly average regular-season goaltender, or even slightly below it — when examining only netminders who have played at least 300 games since the 2005-06 lockout (i.e. the guys who have been starters for the bulk of his career), he's 18th of 25 in save percentage — who goes to absolute pieces in the playoffs. Craft all the arguments in his favor you want, but there's no way to put lipstick on a .903 career postseason save percentage, or the fact that this postseason might be his first since winning the Cup in which he posts a save percentage that doesn't start with a 0.8.



Last year, after he gave up 17 goals in five games and got pulled from the playoff starter role, I wrote that the Penguins should strongly consider buying him out. They didn't, and we were told that he'd gotten his head on straight thanks to a sports psychologist, and he'd get a new goalie coach, and he was still young enough to get this all straightened out sufficiently. The evidence is now pretty sufficient that this is, in fact, not the case. Whatever plagues him when he gets to the postseason is still there.

Again, anyone could have predicted this. You didn't need some advanced hockey insight to say, “Marc-Andre Fleury? Yeah he's gonna be terrible in the playoffs, just like every year.” You didn't need assurances he'd be fine this time around, because you knew, in your heart of hearts, that he of course would not be.

But the problem isn't Fleury's performance on the ice. Well, it is. But it's not the only problem. The other problem, and perhaps the bigger one, is what Fleury does to the rest of the team. And I'm not talking about this nonsense mumbo jumbo of “they know he's going to blow it,” or “they grip their sticks tighter when they're in the defensive zone.”

The Penguins are devoting $5 million per season against the cap to this big-time actor in the annual tragedy of another playoff meltdown. Have been since before he won the Cup. That should tell you something about the general lack of vision most NHL general managers have when it comes to evaluating goaltender performance; while this current deal, which runs through the end of next season, was signed after Fleury went .921 in the regular season (though in just 35 games) and then .933 in the playoff run that resulted in a six-game defeat at the hands of the Red Wings, it followed a season in which he went .906 regular-season and .880 playoffs.

That he won the Cup in the first year of that deal ensured people in Pittsburgh would think he was worth the money forever. But over time, his frailties have become more apparent, and his contract and status as the clear No. 1 haven't changed. This is what that big money buys you, apparently.

And that's really the problem here. The Penguins aren't playing badly because it's the playoffs and they're not playing badly because they don't trust Fleury. They're playing badly because half their roster can't cut it. Tyler Dellow did the legwork to demonstrate just how bad Pittsburgh's third and fourth lines are at driving play. The second graph in that post illustrates just how badly they get buried.

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