There's no need to overthink the Calder conversation
For pretty much the entire season, there has been a general agreement that the Calder voting was a fait accompli for the budding Canucks superstar.
Elias Pettersson — 26 goals and 56 points in as many games as of this writing — in a walk. Simple enough. He leads the rookie goalscoring race by seven despite playing fewer games than basically everyone else on the list, and the next-closest producer is 19 points back. Tap-in decision.
And it seemed like everyone figured the only thing worth debating, if you want to even give the subject that much thought, is who other two finalists would end up being. Plenty of good candidates: Rasmus Dahlin, the defenseman who looks elite already despite the fact that he won’t turn 19 for another month. Carter Hart, the goalie who almost saved the Flyers before his teammates remembered they were the Flyers. Colin White or Brady Tkachuk, who are both having strong seasons for a woebegone Ottawa team. Jesperi Koktaniemi, as solid a two-way rookie forward as you’re going to see in this league.
But come on, it’s still Pettersson, right? Well, now people — mainly those in the Midwest or who are generally prone to stand for goalies — are saying “What about Jordan Binnington?”
So let’s talk about Binnington, whose arrival in St. Louis not so coincidentally lines up 1-to-1 with the team forcing its way into the playoffs after looking like they were dead in the water as recently as early January.
The basic facts are these: Binnington has a .929 save percentage and 16 wins in 20 starts. You can see where the argument arises based on that alone. He’s certainly been better than Hart, who has 13 wins in 22 starts and a .917 save percentage, and has a longer resume than Mackenzie Blackwood, who’s save percentage is .931, but only has 15 appearances, in which he is 6-6-0. Cal Petersen in LA has a .924 but a 5-4-1 record in limited action because he’s on the Kings.
So it’s clear, immediately, that Binnington stands above the field there and unlike most of those other goalies in the conversation, he has a nice story, too. He’s pushing 26, almost too old to be a rookie at all, and prior to this season had just one NHL appearance, in which he gave up a goal on just four shots. Otherwise, he’s a career AHLer, and only occasionally an above-average one. But he got a shot this year and certainly ran with it.
He’s been compared to Andrew Hammond, and I think that’s fair, because it’s two guys with meh-or-worse track records apparently dragging a team everyone stopped believing in back to the playoffs.
And what Binnington is doing here is, to be sure, incredibly rare: Only three other goalies in the cap era finished their rookie seasons with at least 20 starts and save percentages above .925. Two of them are Tuukka Rask and Cory Schneider, and the other is Juuse Saros just last year.
What, one wonders, do all their teams (the ’09-10 Bruins, ’10-11 Canucks, and ’17-18 Predators) have in common with this Blues team? They were all high-end possession teams, ranking fourth or fifth in the league in their respective seasons. That’s not where the Blues are quite yet; they’ve worked their way to a top-10 spot under Craig Berube despite being mediocre or worse with Mike Yeo behind the bench.
Moreover, they’re trending up; in all situations, the Blues are now close to being top-five in expected-goals. Which helps you win, obviously. But Binnington isn’t exactly just a passenger here. Despite the fact that he’ll probably finish in the area of 32 or 33 starts, which isn’t a huge number, he’s already 11th in the league in terms of goals saved above expected, adding about three points to the Blues’ total in just 22 appearances.
The problem, then, is that no matter how high his save percentage remains — and you can certainly be dubious that he’ll finish the season like this; 16 more games is a lot of runway — he’s probably not going to get enough appearances to really warrant consideration. Only three goalies have won the Calder since the turn of the century: Evgeni Nabokov, Andrew Raycroft, and Steve Mason. Raycroft played the fewest games of that group, at 57. Binnington could fall 25 short of that number.
As to the issue of sustainability, obviously Binnington, like Hammond before him, isn’t this good. In fact, in his last five starts he’s been flatly submediocre (.902), so regression might already be happening. But the Calder isn’t a record of who’s going to be good for a long time, it’s a record of who was good in his rookie season. Which is why Barret Jackman, Andrew Raycroft, and Tyler Myers won one. Binnington, unquestionably, has been great.
But he hasn’t been great for long enough, and more to the point his late arrival means you have to present a counterargument to the long-prevailing wisdom that Pettersson is and should be the winner. I’m not really sure there is one except for the fact that the Blues will make the playoffs and the Canucks will not.
That might matter to MVP voters but just in recent memory, Aaron Ekblad, Jonathan Huberdeau, Jeff Skinner, Gabe Landeskog and of course Mat Barzal won without having made the playoffs.
Put another way: Pettersson has been exceptional on a bad team since early October. Binnington has been similarly exceptional since mid-December. Which deservedly gets you into the conversation, but it doesn’t get you over the hump.
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Ryan Lambert is a Yahoo! Sports hockey columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
