Jet Greaves got left off NHL Network’s top-10 goalies list, and the omission is hard to square with what he put on the ice last season.
The network unveiled its ranking yesterday, and Greaves was nowhere to be found. That stood out immediately, because his numbers stack up with plenty of the goalies who did make the cut.
Jet Greaves was a top-10 goalie in the NHL last season.
Start with the basic stuff, and the case is already there. Greaves finished with 26 wins, which topped Shesterkin’s 25, Hellebuyck’s 23 and Wallstedt’s 18. He also ranked seventh in the league in saves with 1,397, seventh in goals against average at 2.60 among goalies with at least 40 games played, and tied for sixth in save percentage at .908% with that same 40-game minimum.
That save percentage put him ahead of all but three goalies on the NHL Network list: Vasilevskiy, Thompson and Shesterskin.
The games-played cutoff makes the omission even tougher to explain. Wallstedt appeared in 35 games for the Wild last season, which falls short of that 40-game mark. If that was enough of a sample for Wallstedt to land on the list, the question is obvious: why not Greaves?
The advanced numbers only strengthen the argument. According to MoneyPuck, Greaves finished ninth in the league in goals saved above expected at 16.5, ninth in WAR at 2.74, and allowed fewer rebounds per save than any goalie on the top-10 list.
And then there’s the context of who he was playing behind. Greaves did all of this with the Blue Jackets, a team that was especially loose defensively for the first three months of the season.
That’s why it’s easy to make the case that Greaves didn’t just belong on the list - he should have been near the top half of it, maybe sixth or seventh. Anyone who watched him last year would have a hard time arguing otherwise. Team Canada clearly took notice when it built its roster for the World Championships.
Maybe that’s the real issue here. The NHL Network crew probably didn’t get many Blue Jackets games, and all of the names on their list came from playoff teams, which is apparently when their analysts started paying attention.
For Greaves, the answer is simple: keep playing the way he played last season and keep forcing people to notice.