Buffalo Sabres

State of the Sabres - Part 2 - What’s our Goal?

When discussing the situation in goal, I probably could keep this short and sweet. Ryan Miller’s the goaltender for the Sabres when the team restarts in September. They need to sign a backup in the off-season, and it won’t be Joceyln Thibault.

End of Story….you can stop reading now.

But it’s never that simple…is it?

The thing is, outside of Buffalo, I’m sure most people think that this is a no-brainer. Miller took the Sabres to Eastern Conference finals in his first two full seasons in the NHL. He was the starting goalie on the all-star team a year ago. He’s entering the last year of his contract, and will probably be ready to sign a long-term deal after July 1st. Sabres management has stated their desire to do this. Why wouldn’t the Sabres want him around long-term?

Well, the fans in Buffalo have turned on Ryan Miller to some extent…not everyone, but a vocal minority. A lot of people I know are saying that Miller lets in too many softies, he let the team down late in the season when he was needed to most, and he should not be given a big long-term contract. He is simply not the goalie of their future.

The funny thing is before this season I was often the one arguing against Ryan Miller. My feeling on him was he was a pretty good goalie but has yet to prove that he is a GREAT goaltender…and I am not convinced that he will ever acheive greatness. His play late this last season was definitely sub-par and he DID let in a lot of soft goals in the last two months. But even so I find myself defending him….”He played too many games down the stretch…the team hasn’t played well in front of him…those were some pretty awful goals he let in last night.” Should I be defending him?

Since this IS Hockeyanalysis after all, let’s take a closer look at Ryan’s stats. (I do want to point out that the Sabres play an open style of hockey that does not condone to a goaltender having stellar numbers, but it is the best way to analyze his worth.) While providing a variety of #s, I ranked his stats compared to other goalies based on save %. Amongst starting goalies, the ranking from ESPN.com showed goalies that started at least 27 games. His regular season records for the last 3 seasons:

05-06: 48 GP 2.60 GAA 0.914 SV% (Ranked 9th)
06-07: 63 GP 2.73 GAA 0.911 SV% (Ranked 15th)
07-08: 76 GP 2.64 GAA 0.906 SV% (Ranked 24th)

Note that while his goal against has remained about the same, his save % has dropped every year. In particular last year he did not even rank amongst the top half of the goaltenders in the NHL. His shootout stats outlined below show an even more precipitous drop-off in the recent campaign:

05-06: 12 SV 17 SHA 70.6 SV% (Rank 14th - out of goalies with >10 SHAgainst)
06-07: 37 SV 46 SHA 80.4 SV% (Rank 6th)
07-08: 19 SV 33 SHA 57.6 SV% (Rank 27th)

{Why do I bother showing shootouts? Because the Sabres were 10-4 in shootouts in 06-07 when they won the President’s trophy, and were 4-9 in 07-08 when they missed the playoffs by 4 points. This amount to 6 points in the season lost season-to-season. Regardless of what you think about shootouts, they are an important part of where your team finishes.}

Finally, his record in the playoffs the last two years. Here I must say he’s pretty solid, especially during the last playoff run, but it still leaves him in the middle of the playoff pack.
05-06: 18 GP (11-7) 2.56 GAA 0.908 SV% (Rank 8 of 17)
06-07: 16 GP (9-7) 2.22 GAA 0.922 SV% (Rank 8 of 16)

So, the stats seem to agree with what people are saying. He did not have a good last season, that’s for sure. Sometimes it helps to look at things a little closer, there’s a larger story behind the stats. Knowing some of the story, I went and broke down his record into three sections this season.

1) Miller started the season not playing well. His record in the first 15 games he started he had a 2.81 GAA, a 0.899 SV%, and a record of 5-9-1.

2) Shortly after this, Ryan admitted that with the departure of Drury and Briere, he had initially decided to take a more vocal leadership role, and admitted that it had affected his game. (I could not find the exact quote on this, but I heard it in an interview on local radio station WGR, so I am paraphrasing here.) He decided he had to step back and focus more on his game. This obviously worked, and in the next 37 games he played he had a 2.16 GAA, 0.924 SV% and a record of 21-8-5. (there were 3 no decision losses in there) These numbers are especially impressive when you consider the Sabres had a 1-7-5 streak in the middle of those games.

3) Late in the season Ryan’s play fell terribly. In the last 24 games he played in, he dropped to a 3.34 GAA, a dismal 0.882 SV%, posting a 10-10-4 record in those games.

What happened here? I blame Lindy Ruff. He’s a great coach, but one of his great mistakes of the past year was he ran Ryan Miller into the ground this season. The man played 76 of 82 games! He was the starting goalie for 34 games in a row. Now Lindy was in a situation where he was on the outside of the playoffs looking in with a backup that had proven himself unreliable. Lindy even admitted it might not have been the best choice here, as quoted from an April 10th press conference sabrefans.com:

Q: Would you want him to play seventy-six games again…?

Ruff: I’ve already said that, ideally, no. No. Not the number of games he played. I think that…it was a very trying season for him in a case where you don’t know what you’re going to get out of your goaltender until you go there. Can you look back on it and say, ‘Boy, I wish I didn’t play that number of games’? You know, hindsight is always a tough place to go. I think where he lost a little bit was some quality practice time in a real tough schedule. When you go into February and March, where he couldn’t take three days just to work on basic stuff that has nothing to do with shots. It has to do with positioning and tracking [the puck] - all of the little drills that you would do that you get right back to the background of playing goal. For him, it was ‘try to get him some rest’ and we played him and ‘try to get him some rest’. I actually encouraged him at times not to go on [the ice] where he liked to take shots.

What does all this mean to me…I still think Ryan Miller is worthy of being a starting goaltender in the national hockey league…though whether he will even be a top five or even top ten goaltender is still up in the air. And there’s something I like about his game…it’s not spectacular, but so fundamentally strong. If he can get his breakaway skills back up to 06-07 talent, he will never be the weak link on any team. And to me, he’s reaching the age where most goalies finally break-out.

But, even if you don’t like him, what would be a viable alternative? The Sabres don’t have any sort of prospect in the wings. Jonas Enroth is probably their best goalie prospect since Miller, but hasn’t even played in the AHL yet, and is probably 2-3 years from even making it to the NHL, never mind as a starter. The only other choice is free agency, where you only overpay for talent, and would be unlikely to upgrade from what Miller gives you…no-one better is even available.

What the Sabres should do: Ryan is entering the last year of his contract. I believe that the Sabres should re-sign him to a long-term deal, depending somewhat on what he is looking for. Hopefully he would be willing to sign for slightly less than the money Henrik Lundqvist recently got at $6.875 million a season. I think at 5-years, $30 million would be fair money for his services. If he demands a larger contract than that, they may end up waiting to see how the season plays out, though this would draw the wrath of fans looking at the possibility of another of the teams stars walking away next year. They then need to sign a reliable back-up that can start 12-20 games for Miller, giving him some sort of rest. Jocelyn Thibault is unlikely to be that man, as they team showed no confidence in him down the stretch, though admittedly what play he had didn’t merit much confidence.

What the Sabres will do: I think this is close to what they will do, though they may just pay Miller more (between $6 and $7 million per year) for the security of having a long-term solution at goaltender. I think the only reason he wouldn’t be locked up is if he really doesn’t want to stay here, which I don’t think is likely.

So I made what seemed so simple awfully complicated. But the results were the same. Too bad I don’t get paid by the word. Coming up in Part 3 - Looking “Forward”