The goaltending coach for the best netminder in the National Hockey League this season is known for his love of one-liners.

“You never need goaltending until you don’t have goaltending,” says Washington Capitals’ Mitch Korn. “You know, anybody can be a backup until they have to play. Young goalies are like child actors; they’re dysfunctional.”

Korn, whose disciples include everyone from this year’s Vezina Trophy favourite Braden Holtby to Nashville’s Pekka Rinne and Hall of Fame goaltender Dominik Hasek, has hundreds of these witticisms. He sprinkles them into his sentences as he speaks, pausing after each delivery, as though half-expecting to hear an accompanying rim-shot.

They’re all true, he says. Especially the one comparing bad goaltending to having a bad back: You know, everything is affected.

“If you have a bad back,” says Korn, “there isn’t anything you can do well or quickly or without pain. You can’t even tie your shoes. That’s what your team’s like if you don’t have a goalie.”

Keeping with that analogy, the Montreal Canadiens threw out their backs when Carey Price was injured for the second time this season on Nov. 25. The other six Canadian teams, meanwhile, have gone years without being able to tie their shoelaces without grimacing in pain.

It’s a major reason no Canadian team qualified for the playoffs this season. And it partly explains why it has been 23 years since the Stanley Cup was paraded north of the border. As Korn says, “When you have a goalie, it’s like having money in a savings account. You’re more likely to take a bit of a gamble.”

Last year, Montreal rode Price’s MVP season to the top of the Atlantic Division, while Calgary, Winnipeg, Ottawa and Vancouver relied on above-average goaltending to qualify for the playoffs, unexpectedly in the case of Calgary and Winnipeg. But with Price hurt, there has not been a goaltender worth betting on this year.

Of the 10 worst goals-against averages in the league, six belong to players who spent the season on Canadian-based teams.

Without Price, who helped Montreal to a 9-0-0 start to the season, the Canadiens were exposed as a flawed team. The Senators never saw that same Hamburglar-type magic out of Andrew Hammond or Craig Anderson. Vancouver’s Ryan Miller and Winnipeg’s Ondrej Pavelec both lost their starting jobs (or are about to), while Jonas Hiller was so bad that Calgary pulled Niklas Backstrom out of semi-retirement.

Edmonton and Toronto? Well, not even Price in his prime would have helped those teams.

“Certainly, goaltending masks a lot of issues,” says TSN analyst and former NHL goaltender Jamie McLennan. “There wasn’t a goaltending tandem in Canada that masked the issues. There are some teams that could turn the corner if they had elite goaltending and there are teams that are average if they don’t have elite goaltending. There’s no team that has success with an average goaltender. They are the backbone.”

RELATED

The thing is, this is not exactly a new concept. Every year, it gets said that goaltending wins championships. With the exception of maybe Chris Osgood in Detroit and Antti Niemi and Corey Crawford in Chicago, recent Stanley Cup winners have featured an elite goaltender in net.

While you can’t even make the playoffs without above-average goaltending, it can also be the great equalizer.

As we saw last year with Montreal, it can turn an average team into a great one. Or as was the case this year with Calgary, it can put an otherwise good team into a lottery position.

The Canadiens might not have had a player in the top 20 in scoring in 1992-93. But they had Patrick Roy, a Hall of Fame goaltender who was named playoff MVP after winning a record 10 games in overtime en route to his second of four Stanley Cups.

“I can’t tell you how many times we had breakaways and shot the puck into the crowd, because we thought we had to be way too perfect to beat him,” said Sportsnet analyst Glenn Healy, who was the New York Islanders goaltender who faced Roy and the Canadiens in the 1993 conference final.

“I thought, ‘I can’t make a mistake, because I know he’s not going to make one.’ ”

Aside from Montreal — which likely would have made the playoffs had Price stayed healthy — the Canadian teams have become goalie graveyards. It’s been this way for years.

* Toronto, which traded a future Vezina Trophy winner in Tuukka Rask for Andrew Raycroft in 2006, has had a revolving door of starters since Ed Belfour and Curtis Joseph were in net.

* Vancouver had Roberto Luongo and Cory Schneider — perhaps the best tandem in the NHL — and has not been the same since trading both.

* Calgary is still searching for Miikka Kiprusoff’s replacement.

* Edmonton is looking for the next Grant Fuhr.

* Ottawa and Winnipeg are looking for some sort of consistency.

Some of this is on the goaltenders. Some of this is on the team in front of them. After all, Oilers first-round pick Devan Dubnyk only became a Vezina Trophy finalist once he played behind Minnesota’s structured defence. And Brian Elliott’s career took off only after leaving Ottawa and arriving in St. Louis.

“It takes a certain temperament to play in Canada,” says McLennan. “Roberto Luongo was a star in Florida, goes to Vancouver and stars there and then the fans turn on him because he doesn’t deliver a Cup and then leaves and it’s like, ‘Oh geez, we lost a really good goalie.’ They’re still recovering from losing him and Cory Schneider.”

“Ultimately, you’d like to have a star in goal,” says Joseph. “There’s not a lot of them, though.”

Why haven’t goaltenders had much success in Canada in the past 10 years? Is it the pressure? Is it a lack of talent? Is it the team in front of them? Or is it that, like Winnipeg’s Connor Hellebuyck, who is 22, they are being asked to save the world night after night, often when they are still learning the position?

“I think what happens a lot of times is goalies get rushed to the NHL,” says former Leafs goaltender coach Steve McKichan. “Toronto tried to rush (Justin) Pogge to the NHL, as an example. You put a young kid in that hotbed and it’s a tough place to learn your craft. If they kept Tuukka and traded Pogge, Tuukka would have been thrown to the wolves. I’m not sure he would have had the same result as he did in Boston.”

Maybe Anderson, whose up-and-down career in Ottawa has mimicked an ECG machine, rebounds next season. Maybe Edmonton’s Cam Talbot looks better once the players in front of him mature and maybe Hellebuyck and Vancouver prospect Thatcher Demko develop into legitimate No. 1s.

Or maybe, with Anaheim’s Frederik Andersen potentially available in the summer, a team such as Calgary or Toronto finally bites the bullet and trades for a goaltender who can make a huge difference.

As Korn says, “When you have a goalie, you have a mindset and it changes everything. Everyone’s approach, everyone’s confidence, everyone’s swagger. Everything’s better.”

That also includes, of course, the team’s overall record.

NET WORTHLESS

Goaltending is the great equalizer. With it, a good team can become great. And without it, as the Montreal Canadiens showed this season, it can have the opposite effect.

Here is a look at how goaltending has affected the Canadian-based teams in the past 10 years:



2015-16

Technically, Carey Price’s .934 save percentage was the best in the league this season. It doesn’t count, of course, because he only played 12 games. Of the 10 worst save-percentages this season, five of the goalies (Toronto’s Jonathan Bernier, Winnipeg’s Michael Hutchinson and Ondrej Pavelec, Montreal’s Mike Condon and Calgary’s Jonas Hiller) played for Canadian teams, while Anders Nilsson spent most of the season in Edmonton before heading to St. Louis.



1st, St. Louis, .919 save percentage

T-2nd, Washington, .918

T-2nd, Pittsburgh, .918

T-2nd, Chicago, .918

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T-15th, Vancouver, .910

T-15th, Ottawa, .910

T-21st, Edmonton, .905

T-23rd, Toronto, .904

T-26th, Montreal, .903

T-26th, Winnipeg, .903

30th, Calgary, .892



2014-15

An historic year for goaltending saw Price win the Vezina, Hart and Jennings Trophies. It didn’t translate into a championship, however, as Montreal was eliminated in the conference semifinal. Chicago’s Corey Crawford, who temporarily lost the starting job to Scott Darling in the first round, reclaimed the net and won his second Stanley Cup with a .938 save percentage in the final.



1st, Montreal, .926

2nd, Chicago, .925

3rd, N.Y. Rangers, .923

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4th, Ottawa, .921

T-10th, Winnipeg, .913

T-15th, Calgary, .911

T-17th, Vancouver, .910

25th, Toronto, .906

30th, Edmonton, .888



2013-14

Price, who was top-three in the league with a .927 save percentage, led Montreal to a 100-point season and seemed to be on his way to leading the Canadiens to a berth in the Stanley Cup final. But then Rangers forward Chris Kreider crashed into Price in Game 1 of the conference final, injuring the Canadiens goaltender. Though backup goalie Dustin Tokarski played well enough, Montreal lost in six games.



1st, Boston, .928 percentage

2nd, Los Angeles, .922

T-3rd, Montreal, .921

T-3rd, N.Y. Rangers, .921

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T-9th, Toronto, .914

T-19th, Ottawa, .909

T-22nd, Vancouver, .907

T-22nd, Winnipeg, .907

27th, Edmonton, .901

28th, Calgary, .899



2012-13

Ottawa’s Craig Anderson played in exactly half of the 48 games during the lockout-shortened season, but no one came even close to his league-leading 1.69 goals-against average and .941 save percentage. The playoffs, however, told a different story. The Senators goaltender had an .884 save percentage in a second-round loss to the Penguins, while the three other Canadian playoff teams (Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver) failed to advance past the first round.



1st, Ottawa, .933 save percentage

T-2nd, Chicago, .923

T-2nd, Boston, .923

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T-7th, Vancouver, .917

T-7th, Toronto, .917

T-7th, Edmonton, .917

T-18th, Montreal, .904

T-21st, Winnipeg, .901

29th, Calgary, .889



2011-12

Vezina Trophy finalist Jonathan Quick continued his stellar play into the playoffs, where he was named Conn Smythe winner after leading Los Angeles to its first Stanley Cup. In Vancouver, the goaltending controversy that would eventually cost the Canucks both Cory Schneider and Roberto Luongo was peaking, with Schneider outplaying Luongo in the regular season and then replacing him in Game 3 of a first-round loss to the Kings.



1st, St. Louis, .929 save percentage

2nd, Phoenix, .925

T-3rd, Vancouver, .924

T-3rd, Los Angeles, .924

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T-9th, Calgary, .914

T-13th, Montreal, .912

T-16th, Ottawa, .910

20th, Edmonton, .908

25th, Winnipeg, .902

T-28th, Toronto, .898



2010-11

Luongo, who combined with Schneider to win the Williams Jennings Trophy (2.20 goals-against average), was a finalist for the Vezina Trophy with a .928 save percentage. But he was shakier in the playoffs, especially in games held in Boston. Although Luongo shut out the Bruins twice in Vancouver in the Stanley Cup final, he allowed 15 goals in three games on the road. Tim Thomas, who won the Vezina Trophy, won the Conn Smythe with a .940 save percentage as the Bruins won the Cup in seven games.



1st, Boston, .930 save percentage

2nd, Vancouver, .927

3rd, Nashville, .924

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T-5th, Montreal, .919

T-20th, Toronto, .904

T-20th, Ottawa, .904

T-23, Calgary, .902

T-27th, Edmonton, .900



2009-10

On the strength of Jaroslav Halak, the eighth-seeded Canadiens upset Alex Ovechkin and the Presidents’ Trophy-winning Washington Capitals in the first round and defeated Sidney Crosby and the Stanley Cup-defending Pittsburgh Penguins to reach the conference final, before losing to the Flyers. The Blackhawks ended up winning the Stanley Cup, even though Antti Niemi had an .882 save percentage in the final. He was allowed to walk away as a free agent after the season.



T-1st, Boston, .922 save percentage

T-1st, Buffalo, .922

T-3rd, Arizona, .919

T-3rd, San Jose, .919

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5th, Montreal, .917

T-8th, Calgary, .914

T-14th, Vancouver, .910

T-27th, Ottawa, .900

29th, Edmonton, .898

30th, Toronto, .892



2008-09

For the first time in the modern era, both Toronto and Ottawa failed to qualify for the playoffs. It was not hard to see why. The Leafs’ Vesa Toskala ranked in the bottom-four with an .891 save percentage, while Senators’ Brian Elliott (. 902) was only slightly better. It was like this in most Canadian cities, where Calgary’s Miikka Kiprusoff (.903) and Edmonton’s Dwayne Roloson (. 915) were both starting to show their age, and Montreal’s Carey Price (. 905) was suffering through a sophomore slump.



1st, Boston, .925

T-2nd, Minnesota, .922

T-2nd, Florida, .922

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T-7th, Vancouver, .911

T-11th, Edmonton, .909

13th, Montreal, .908

T-21st, Ottawa, .901

25th, Calgary, .899

30th, Toronto, .885



2007-08

A year after winning the AHL’s Calder Cup, where he was playoff MVP, a 20-year-old Carey Price tied for sixth in the league with a .920 save percentage and led the Canadiens past the Bruins in the first round — Calgary and Ottawa were both eliminated — before losing his starting job midway through the conference semifinal. The Red Wings won the Stanley Cup, with a goaltending tandem of Chris Osgood and Dominik Hasek, which ranked outside the top 15 in save percentage.



T-1st, Anaheim, .920 save percentage

T-1st, Florida, .920

3rd, Montreal, .917

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T-8th, Vancouver, .913

T-17th, Calgary, .904

T-17th, Edmonton, .904

23rd, Ottawa, .901

29th, Toronto, .893



2006-07

Ottawa’s Ray Emery ranked in the top 10 with a .918 save percentage during the regular season and helped Ottawa reach the Stanley Cup final for the first time. But the Senators, who lost just three games in the first three rounds, were a team that relied on its offence more than its goaltending. And in the final, Anaheim’s Jean-Sebastien Giguere — with considerable help from defencemen Chris Pronger and Scott Niedermayer — was too difficult to beat.



1st, Minnesota, .922 save percentage

2nd, Nashville, .919

3rd, Vancouver, .918

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5th, Ottawa, .913

T-6th, Calgary, .912

T-11th, Montreal, .907

17th, Edmonton, .900

27th, Toronto, .888

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