Sky-high expectations for Hellebuyck

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This article was published 06/01/2021 (1708 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If left up to Connor Hellebuyck, the Winnipeg Jets goaltender would be in net for all 56 of his team’s regular-season games this season.

But Hellebuyck’s job is to stop shots, not call them. However, that doesn’t mean the reigning Vezina Trophy winner doesn’t have a more reasonable workload in mind for an encore, in what should be a very interesting truncated NHL season owing to COVID-19.

“We’ve briefly talked about it and I’m a guy that likes to play a lot, so I would like to get 40-45 games but who knows what’s going to happen,” Hellebuyck said during a Zoom interview Wednesday, following the Jets’ third day of training camp at Bell MTS Iceplex. “I could get even hotter and I can go even more or I’ll be very hot and could be in a playoff spot and then we could start riding (backup Laurent Brossoit) a bit to give me some rest. So it depends on how the season plays out but I would like to be somewhere in the 40-45 range.”

The ever-confident Hellebuyck is coming off a 2019-20 season where he was crowned the best netminder on the planet. He was voted the league’s top goaltender following a campaign that saw the 27-year-old pitch the NHL’s most shutouts (six) and recorded saves (1,656), while allowing the sixth-fewest goals against (140) and posting the seventh-best save percentage (.922).

It was the second time in three seasons Hellebuyck was nominated for the Vezina trophy, falling just short in 2018 to Nashville’s Pekka Rinne. That consistent success inside the crease has earned Hellebuyck a lot of trust with the coaching staff, and made him a bigger part of the decision-making process as to when he plays.

“I’m surprised he dropped it to 45, to be honest with you,” Jets head coach Paul Maurice said with a smirk when told the amount of games Hellebuyck hoped to play this season. “Connor and I started talking about those (number of) games. (Jets goalie coach) Wade Flaherty does all of (scheduling), but when Connor wants to play and I won’t play him, we have a conversation and he understands now. We’re developing that. He’s changing as a goaltender who is coming into his prime. He’s going to be big and strong for six, seven, eight, nine more years. If you asked him, 15 years.”

Maurice said scheduling Hellebuyck’s starts is done mostly in advance. While hurdles will inevitably occur throughout a season, the Jets coach said Hellebuyck is usually aware of the plan one or two weeks in advance, understanding around “60-70 per cent of what we’re doing.”

“But he’s also never 100 per cent sure he’s playing the next night. Like Flats will go to him and say, ‘Yeah, you’re going,’ and nine times out of 10 Connor expected to. I enjoy having those conversations with Connor because they make me smile because the first thing out of his mouth is, ‘I’m ready, man. I can play. No, I feel good. You’ve got to put me in.’ He’s a gamer, man. He’s competitive.”

Hellebuyck spent much of his off-season working with his personal goalie coach, Randy Wilson, a former high school coach of his that he’s trained with ever since. This year they focused mainly on good scoring-chance plays, something Hellebuyck was forced to endure a lot of last season.

With the emergence of analytics in recent years, statistics can now better determine how rough — or easy — a goalie has had it from year to year. Last season, Hellebuyck posted a mark of 22.40 in goals saved above average (GSAA), which is a statistic used to determine the number of goals a goalie prevented given his save percentage and shots faced versus the league average save percentage on the same number of shots. According to hockey-reference.com, only Boston’s Tuukka Rask fared better (22.51).

Hellebuyck also faced a league-high 412 high-danger shots, resulting in the NHL’s most high-danger saves, with 347. High-danger shots include rebounds in front of the net, or any other area close to the net that would often result in a chance becoming a goal.

“I just have fun doing that, too, because that’s challenging, that’s the hard part of goaltending,” Hellebuyck said. “When I come to camp, I get a lot of shots, those straight-on shots, so I’ll get that plentiful here. During the (off-season), I really wanted to work on pass-outs and back doors and all the scoring chances that you’d almost give the advantage to the forward, so I could stop a few more of those a year and sometimes that’s going to make the difference.”

If Hellebuyck feeling better prepared to make more challenging saves is the good news, the bad news is he’s likely up for another vulcanized rubber-filled affair in 2021. The Jets have added a few new pieces to the back end, including bringing in defenceman Derek Forbort to help solidify their top-four. But the team’s identity remains as a club with an abundance of forward talent and an elite goalie.

The defence remains a work in progress. That likely means the Jets will have to once again lean on their goalie if they hope to make a long playoff run.

“One hundred per cent, but we’re going to do everything in our power to give him a chance to be the difference. We’ve got some really skilled forwards that didn’t get into the NHL defending. They got into the NHL scoring. The cost of that was the changeover we’ve had on our defence,” Maurice said. “But we know that we’ve got really competitive defencemen back there. When you think of all the injuries and everything that we went through, and believe me I know what the analytics say in terms of chances against, we ask Connor Hellebuyck to be really, really good to give us a chance to win games and he did that. So I think we are going to be far better in terms of what we ask of Connor Hellebuyck but our expectation is that he will be a difference-maker for us and we’re going to need him to be.”

jeff.hamilton@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @jeffkhamilton