Craig Anderson in Net is Always Unpredictable

Very few goaltenders in the NHL are as enigmatic as Craig Anderson. They say that a team will only go as far as their netminder will take them, and that’s never a predictable endeavor with Anderson in the crease.

The Ottawa Senators’ underachieving season last year can’t be placed squarely on Anderson. The Senators absolutely hung him out to dry all season.

Anderson must have thought he was being punished for something, because the barrage of shots he faced on a seemingly nightly basis would rattle anybody.

The Senators are lucky that Anderson is as mentally tough as he is, because it might have been even worse without his resolve.

The Senators lead the league in shots per game allowed at 32.8 per contest. Anderson played in 60 out of the Senators’ 82 games. That’s a lot of abuse.

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All things being equal, the team that allows the most shots per game should also allow the most goals per game. This is where Anderson shows his talent. The Senators only ranked 5th in the league in most goals allowed per game.

However, combined with his durability and his propensity to be faced with an avalanche of shots (fitting that he burst onto the scene in Colorado), Anderson lead the league in goals allowed with 161.

He ranked just 24th in the league in save percentage at .916, which simply isn’t impressive enough to hold down the fort when faced with so many shots.

Anderson didn’t stand on his head often enough to keep the Senators competitive, which is what it would have taken.

An elite goaltender can elevate his team in dire circumstances, but Anderson isn’t elite. There’s nothing wrong with that. After digesting all of his tremendous inconsistencies, he’s a solid goaltender.

Anderson has certainly shown flashes of brilliance during his career. He has finished in the top 4 in Vezina Trophy voting twice.

He lead the league in save percentage and goals against average in the 2012-2013 season, but that was really his last great season up to this point.

His career quality start percentage is a solid 55.8%, but it hasn’t been above 52% in any of the past 3 seasons. During that same stretch, in 148 games, Anderson has had 20 Really Bad Starts, defined as any game with a save percentage below 85%.

Really Bad Starts for a goalie give his team only a 10% chance of winning that game, according to the stat developer Rob Vollman.

The Senators have had to endure a Really Bad Start from Anderson in around every 7 starts. It’s just hard to maintain success as a team when your goalie is prone to implosions on the ice.

Anderson is 35 years old, and is nearing the end of his career. Where the Senators look to find their goalie of the future is anybody’s guess. Andrew Hammond seemed like that guy after his fantastic 2014-2015 season, but came back down to Earth in 2015-2016.

The Senators will likely have to live with both the good and the bad from Anderson. He has only lead a team out of the first round of the playoffs once, and he isn’t the type to catalyze an ungifted team to overachievement.

Having said that, when he has guided his team to the playoffs, he has played phenomenally. He has a career save percentage in the playoffs of .933, which is a more than 2 percentage point improvement over his career regular season save percentage.

It’s a smaller sample size, but it’s also against lineups talented enough to make the playoffs. Again, he’s a puzzling case.

Another eye opening stat from Anderson is that even in his lackluster performance last season, he still managed to rank 6th in Goalie Point Shares with 11.6, underscoring his value to the team. Of course that’s largely dependent on his hefty games played total, but he ended up ranking 10th in games played, yet 6th in Goalie Point Shares. That alone cements his case as an above average goalie when all things get considered.

Next: Ottawa Senators Need Mike Hoffman to Return

He’s very frustrating at times, but the Senators could certainly do a lot worse in regards to him patrolling the crease.

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