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Flyers Can Have Playoff Success With Sergei Bobrovsky

Jonathan Willis of Hockey Prospectus published an interesting analysis of the Flyers goaltending situation and whether they can rely on their duo of keepers in the playoffs. His findings weren't so much "yes" as they were "why not?"

So far this season, Sergei Bobrovsky has a save percentage of .917. That's as good or better than any goaltender to make the Stanley Cup Finals in the post lockout era.  In fact only Marc-Andre Fleury's mark of .921 in 07/08 is notably better. Their findings also found that almost all of these keepers went on to have better save percentage in the playoffs than they did in the regular season.

Of course, and this is is the point in many ways, a goaltender's regular season doesn't really guarantee him playoff success. Bobrovsky's season has been as good as virtually any Stanley Cup winning netminder in the lockout era. There's really no reason to think Bob can't be good enough to win in the postseason. Antii Niemi's save percentage actually got worse in the playoffs and he won a cup...

That lead Willis to some other interesting findings. The old hockey cliche is that a goalie "stands on his head" and wills his team to a cup, but the reality is that more often than not a goaltender's success is mostly closely tied to how many shots his team allows on him. As the article points out, no team has ever won a cup(again post lockout) while being outshot and/or allowing 30+ shots a game on their netminder. While the Flyers do narrowly outshoot their opponents, they are allowing about 30 shots a game on net.

History would suggest that the amount of pucks a team allows on net has a greater correlation to success than simply who is in the net trying to stop them.