BIGGER PRIZE ON HELLEBUYCK’S MIND
Jets goalie besting Vezina favourite Rinne with Predators on verge of elimination
Pekka Rinne will probably get the Vezina Trophy, but right now Connor Hellebuyck has the inside track on the bigger prize.
The backbone of the Winnipeg Jets has been the better goalie in a head-to-head matchup of two of the finalists for a major NHL goaltending award.
That has the Jets just one win away from a mild second-round upset of the Presidents’ Trophywinning Nashville Predators, a team that made it to the Stanley Cup final last year and was looking like a good bet to take it a step further this year.
The Predators now need a win in Winnipeg, where the Jets recorded 32 wins during the regular season and are 4-1 in the playoffs.
And they’ll have to do it against Hellebuyck, who has written one of the great stories of this NHL season and has been stellar for the most part in this series.
Hellebuyck’s play in the first periods of games 1 and 5 is one of the biggest factors in his team’s 3-2 series lead.
Despite an early onslaught in a hostile and loud building, with the home team feeding off fan energy, Hellebuyck kept those two games scoreless until the Jets could find their wings.
“You’ve just got to weather the storm,” Hellebuyck said. “We believe in the way we’re playing.”
In the end, neither game looked close with the Jets winning by scores of 4-1 and 6-2.
On both occasions, while Hellebuyck was putting the finishing touches on a pair of massive road wins, Rinne was watching from the bench after being pulled in favour of Juuse Saros.
Advantage: 24-year-old Hellebuyck over 35-year-old Rinne.
There are some people in Nashville who would not be shocked if Saros is in net Monday night when the series shifts back to Winnipeg for Game 6.
I wouldn’t bet on that happening given Rinne’s track record, but sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures and the numbers don’t lie.
Rinne has allowed 19 goals through five games in the series.
His goals-against average in the series is 3.91.
That’s just not going to get the job done, especially when Hellebuyck is playing his usual consistent game at the other end.
“There are going to be moments where he’s going to have to stand tall,” Jets captain Blake Wheeler said of his cool, calm and collected goaltender.
“That’s what a good team has. There are going to be times where he doesn’t have to do much of anything. There’s going to be times where he’s going to have to play great. (Saturday) he had a little bit of both.”
Rinne was solid in a Game 4 win in Winnipeg and the Preds need him to steal one or both of the next two games if they want to win this series. The Jets just have too much firepower for the Preds to get average goaltending.
I don’t know if you’d say Hellebuyck has stolen a game yet in the best-of-seven series, but keeping the Jets even in those two first periods was almost criminal.
“It starts with (Hellebuyck),” rookie winger Kyle Connor said.
“If we take care of that stuff, we’ve got a lot of firepower to bury on our chances.”
Hellebuyck’s goals-against average is 2.58 through five games and his save percentage is .926. Those numbers will get you somewhere.
He has been the more effective of the two netminders and you can clearly see why the Jets have so much confidence in him.
Just like he was throughout the regular season, he’s been rock steady and resilient. His positioning, his ability to smother pucks and his penchant for timely saves has taken him from being a question mark to being the answer for the Jets.
It seems so long ago now, but back in training camp Hellebuyck didn’t even have a starting job.
That was supposed to go to Steve Mason, but Hellebuyck seized the day when the veteran faltered early. He’d been training like a fiend all off-season because he didn’t want to be replaced after a roller-coaster ride of a sophomore campaign.
He looked like a different goalie right from the beginning and he has silenced all the doubters.
When the NHL Awards are handed out in Las Vegas in June, it seems likely Rinne’s name will be called to pick up the Vezina Trophy as the league’s best goaltender.
But unless he outperforms Hellebuyck in the next game and possibly one more after that, it’s going to be a hollow win.
Who knows? Hellebuyck might be there anyway.
If the Jets win this series, they’ll be legitimate favourites to win the Stanley Cup, having already dispatched the best regular-season team in the league. They would come with home-ice advantage for the rest of the playoffs.
It would be getting ahead of ourselves to say we expect them to be hoisting the Cup by the middle of next month.
But if they do somehow pull off what was once almost unthinkable, Hellebuyck will surely be one of the prime candidates for the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP.
He’d surely take that over a Vezina any day.