Thomas Vanek couldn't say it, not exactly. Asked the question that Minnesota Wild players have heard a lot lately – about where they were back in mid-January, with only 18 wins in their first 42 games and their playoff hopes slipping away – the sniper couldn't blame teammates.

But what he did say said enough.

"We were playing good hockey," Vanek explained.

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The reason they weren't winning – two struggling goalies – was obvious. More than halfway into what was expected to be a promising season, the Wild sat tied for dead last in team save percentage (.889) with Edmonton, despite playing some of the better possession hockey in the league.

That's where Devan Dubnyk came in.

Dubnyk started his 31st game in a row on Monday in Toronto, continuing a storybook season with a 2-1 win over the lowly Maple Leafs in a run that has highlighted the unpredictability of life as an NHL goaltender.

A year earlier, Dubnyk was on waivers, given up on by two teams and on his way to a third he would never play for. He played eight games in the minors, for the Hamilton Bulldogs. "Humbling," he called it. Even there, he continued to struggle. He wondered where his career was going.

"It certainly was a tough year and a big slip for me," Dubnyk said of last season.

But he caught on as the backup in Arizona, signing for near the league minimum, and wasn't expected to play much, and then a desperate Minnesota team came calling and offered a third-round pick to the Coyotes.

Three months later, Dubnyk is leading one of the hottest teams in the league into the postseason, and he's riding a 23-6-1 record with a .930-plus save percentage that has resurrected Minnesota's season.

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"The trade for Devan was, without question, a turning point," his coach, Mike Yeo, said. "Mentality-wise, focus-wise, it allowed everybody to just to put the onus back on themselves."

The old adage from Harry Neale, about goaltending being 100 per cent of your game if you don't have it, certainly fits today's NHL. The bottom of the standings are littered with teams ruined by leaky netminding – Dallas, Arizona, Edmonton – and the top of them have plenty that are enjoying the opposite effect (Montreal especially).

The trouble is you can rarely tell who'll give you what from year to year, with Dubnyk going from goat to castoff to hero – and probably to sought-after free agent this summer – in the span of a season.

Then there are the likes of Andrew (The Hamburglar) Hammond in Ottawa, Cam Talbot in New York and Steve Mason in Philadelphia, who have all been outstanding despite varied pedigrees and histories.

Heck, even Winnipeg's Ondrej Pavelec was named the NHL's first star of the week on Monday, and he could well lead the new Jets to their first playoff berth after serving as the franchise's Achilles' heel for years.

The reasons why goalies are so unpredictable could fill a book. The way the position is played these days, it's often a matter of percentages, with netminders simply trying to be in the right spot at the right time and hoping they cut off enough of the four-by-six net behind them.

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Randomness is an enormous part of it, with the puck pinging off ankles and pads and posts en route to the net. The bounces can determine your fate – which is enough to drive some off the deep end.

There's a terrific book out right now by sportswriter Dan Robson on former goaltender Clint Malarchuk called The Crazy Game. In it, the veteran of 338 games in an NHL crease, and survivor of one gruesome injury, laments the mental toll the position can take.

One missed save can cost your team a game. One bad game can cost you the starting job – or your next contract. One bad season can cost you your career.

That's where Dubnyk was a year ago, when he walked away from life as the Montreal Canadiens fourth-string goalie, a so-called Black Ace, in the middle of the playoffs.

He had to get away to get back to what he had been, a first-round draft pick who developed into a dependable No. 1. He had to turn his game – and his head space – around to get to here.

It wasn't easy.

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"It's like anything in sports," Dubnyk said. "If you make it too big of a picture, if you think about it that way, if we thought at the start that we had to go 17-3-1, you just can't. You don't do it. It just seems too big. Instead, you just look at the next game. The next push and stop. That next save. The next time that I have to get down and find the puck through legs and work that extra little bit. The smaller you can make the picture, the better off you are."

Nearly 1,300 saves later, Dubnyk is a lot better off. He's a Vézina Trophy candidate for the first time in his career, one of the best goalies in the league.

For now, he's sane. He has gotten the better of the craziest part of the crazy game.