It is Boston’s Linus Ullmark who is posting 2021-22 Igor Shesterkin-like numbers, even better, in fact, but it is the Islanders’ Ilya Sorokin who is having the 2021-22 Shesterkin-like impact on his team.
That should be taken into account by NHL general managers when they fill out their ballots for the Vezina Trophy that the Blueshirts’ netminder captured last year.
Entering the weekend, Ullmark had a .938 save percentage that would tie forebearer Tim Thomas’ 2010-11 NHL record for goaltenders playing at least 50 games in a season … even as Ullmark had played in 46 games with seven to go for the Mighty B’s.
The goals-against average is a league-leading 1.88, which compares favorably to Shesterkin’s 2.07 from 2021-22, when he also finished third in the voting for the Hart Trophy.
Ullmark also leads with 46 goals saved above average, per Hockey-Reference, and has a substantial lead in goals saved above expected per 60:00 at .913, per MoneyPuck.
But the Bruins team behind which Ullmark plays has been a machine for whom backup Jeremy Swayman has posted a .921 save percentage and 2.21 GAA.
The Islanders, well, they would not even be in the vicinity of the playoffs, let alone the first wild-card holder at this moment, without Sorokin’s dominance.
The 27-year-old Russian’s influence extends beyond his .924 save percentage, 2.24 GAA, 33.1 goals saved above average and .683 goals saved above expected per 60:00.
His aura infuses the team with confidence.
His uncanny ability to make seemingly impossible saves in the most critical situations has elevated his team that is often offense-challenged.
Sorokin stands as a candidate to become the second Islander netminder ever to win the Vezina, 41 years after Bill Smith took the trophy in 1982 in the first year of voting for the award.
Prior to that, the trophy was essentially a team award, given to the goaltender(s) playing a minimum of 25 games for the club allowing the fewest goals in the league.
Marty Walsh, newly installed as the NHLPA’s executive director, has a background supporting progressive causes.
But if folks believe that he was hired to lead the union in a charge for social justice, that is a complete misread of his mandate.
One of the major objectives of Walsh’s administration — as it was under Don Fehr — will be to regenerate an international calendar featuring best-on-best tournaments.
If there was ever a time that the PA might have been able to convince the NHL to move from its unyielding hard cap to a soft cap-luxury tax system, it would have come been in 2012 during Fehr’s first CBA negotiation.
There wasn’t even an effort then as Gary Bettman and the Board clawed more back from the union in decreasing the players’ slice of the pie from 57 percent to 50 percent of the gross following a 119-day lockout.
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If you believe the NHL is ever going to give up the hard cap, you’re dreaming.
The only way the hard cap is going away is if the union ever decides to decertify.
That is a concept that seems as foreign as the Flyers ever winning another Stanley Cup.
Boston’s Jim Montgomery has held the pole position for months as it pertains to the Adams Trophy for coach of the year because, remember, the B’s were hardly chalk coming into the season.
But Lindy Ruff merits some pretty strong consideration.
And what about Dean Evason, who has steered Minnesota into the Central’s first-place donnybrook by going 7-1-2 since the brilliant Kirill Kaprizov went down on March 8?
That kind of lends a touch of folly to identifying one player or another as an MVP by assessing an athlete’s implied indispensability.
Stop me if I am wrong (but please keep reading), but wouldn’t Kaprizov have been selected, maybe unanimously, as the Wild’s MVP?
Which reminds me: Which was the more impressive feat: A) the 2001 Avalanche winning the Cup while Peter Forsberg was sidelined for the final two rounds of the tournament; or, B) the 2017 Penguins repeating even though Kris Letang missed the entire playoffs?
In the three drafts from 2003-05, the Penguins drafted four future first-ballot Hall of Famers in Marc-Andre Fleury (first overall in ’03); Evgeni Malkin (second overall in ’04), Sidney Crosby (first overall in ’05) and Letang (62nd overall in ’05) and they didn’t even have to tank to pull it off.
Minnesota seems to have come out ahead in exchanging Cam Talbot for Filip Gustavsson as Fleury’s partner in nets, did the Wild not?
The folks who believed that Calgary general manager Brad Treliving won the summer might want a re-do on that one.
Of course, Jacob Markstrom’s descent into .890 save-percentage territory has not made either the GM or head coach Darryl Suter look very smart.
Random thought, but two of the strangest moves Lou Lamoriello made as Devils GM were acquiring Jocelyn Lemieux months after trading Claude Lemieux and signing Rob Niedermayer as a free agent four years after Scott Niedermayer departed.
Finally, I am aware that the NHL’s decision to grant uniform rights to Fanatics beginning in 2024-25 has generated revulsion on social media.
Maybe it is justified.
But if this outfit can get rid of that garish red collar around the Rangers’ road whites and that ruinous red yoke at the collar of the home blues, I am all in.
