Toward the end of the Boston Bruins’ doomed campaign last season, people seemed to be harping on Tuukka Rask's workload with some frequency.

Specifically, they felt it to have been far too big. He played 70 games, 67 of which were starts, and it was the largest number of his career by a good 20-plus percent. Indeed, in the last two seasons, he nearly doubled the total number of games played he'd racked up in his career, and was in fact busier than when he appeared in 36 of Boston's 48 games in the lockout-shortened season of 2013.

What's interesting about this, though, is the fact that despite the cries for a more reasonable handling of Rask's office hours, there simply isn't a lot of evidence to say that his playing 70 games was the reason his game appeared to take a step back.

And indeed, let's consider for a moment the monumental ask laid at Rask's feet. Not the 70 games, but the fact that people were complaining to some extent about a goaltender “only” carrying a .922 save percentage over 70 games. On more than 2,000 shots last season, Rask allowed just 156 goals, which is just an outrageously strong number, and somehow didn't even warrant a single Vezina vote(???).

Another issue here, of course, is that Rask lost nine games in a shootout, which is a very high number.

It is widely acknowledged that shootouts are effectively coin flips over which no player wields a significant amount of influence, but here's the really crazy part: Those nine shootout losses came despite the fact that he carried a save percentage in shootouts of .755, well above the league average of 698. He carried more than his share of the water in the skills competition, and his teammates decidedly did not.

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If the Bruins' shooters improve that number even slightly, Rask probably has at least two or three more wins on the season, the team makes the playoffs, and we're not having a discussion about, “Did playing 70 games hurt Rask's effectiveness?” How he would have done in the playoffs is anyone's guess at that point, but we have plenty of evidence to suggest that overworked goalies tend to see their wheels come off in the postseason. (I would argue that it's perfectly okay to throw out data from playoff losses, particularly early ones, because you're playing so few games against such good teams that the water is probably going to be pretty muddy.)



And further, that lack of goal-scoring prowess is what led the Bruins to play so many one-goal games in the first place, which is obviously what necessitated Rask playing so often in the first place. I leave it to you to determine whether the team actually did anything this summer to go out and address that rather grave concern.

In addition to all this, the same is probably true if the Bruins' backups last season hadn't been so middling, or at least perceived as such. Niklas Svedberg appeared in 18 games last year, four of them in relief of Rask. He had a .918 save percentage which, while not as good as Rask's, is pretty damn credible and probably indicates he could have been relied upon a little more heavily and still delivered results.

Yet conventional wisdom obviously states that you don't want goalies playing 70-plus games in a given season. That's a lot of work not only physically but mentally, if you choose to believe in that sort of thing, and certainly doesn't seem conducive to all that much success. Last season, Rask became the 17th goaltender since 2005-06 (what I'd consider “modern” hockey in all its aspects) to make at least 70 appearances, but it's a feat that has been accomplished 33 times in that 10-season span. That obviously doesn't include those who worked the equivalent of a 70-game season in 2013 (about 40 appearances in 48 games), which nine guys accomplished.