An Oilers Refinery

I was checking my hockey pool just now and an interesting tidbit caught my eye.

In a game between the Boston Bruins and the Florida Panthers, both goalies had shutouts.

Florida had won the game 1-0, but Tim Thomas received credit too.

Yeah, both goalies.

The league (very appropriately, I might add) awards shutouts to goalies who don’t let in any goals in either regulation or overtime. Which is technically correct as well, since nobody gets a statistical goal count for any that they score in a shootout anyway. And plus, if the goalie plays so well during regulation and overtime to bring it to the shootout, it’s plain silly to take that away from them because they let in a fancy dangle with no defenseman or anything challenging the shooter.

Fancy that.

But here’s one thing I’m glad the NHL has kept up on.

I remember one time before the shootouts began Fred Braithwaite of the Calgary Flames dueled Ed Belfour of the Dallas Stars to a 0-0 tie. Both goalies got shutouts though Braithwaite had the bigger workload by far.

Both teams got 1 point out of that game, and Braithwaite got my props.

Here’s one case where the shootout proves to be useful.

In a game like the 0-0 tie where Braithwaite was hung out to dry, it would have been interesting to see whether his Flames could’ve salvaged a win from it in the shootout, if it had been available.

In the case of Florida beating Boston 1-0, that is exactly what happened.

Tomas Vokoun made 40 stops, not including the ones in the shootout. Thomas made 23.

You get the picture.

Tags: boston bruins, Florida Panthers, Tim Thomas, Tomas Vokoun

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 9:21 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.