The Devils made the splash, but the Islanders may still have the Metro Division’s top goalie.
New Jersey landed Connor Hellebuyck last weekend, adding a three-time Vezina Trophy winner to the mix. On paper, that’s a massive move. But the question hanging over the deal is simple: is Hellebuyck really that far ahead of Ilya Sorokin?
The numbers from last season make the case less cut-and-dried than the trade buzz suggests. Hellebuyck appeared in 57 games and posted a 2.86 GAA with an .895 SV%, along with 5.54 goals saved above expected. That marked a steep drop from the previous year, when he was 39.59 goals saved above expected better.
That earlier season came with hardware and team success attached, as Hellebuyck won both the Vezina Trophy and the Hart Trophy while the Winnipeg Jets captured the Presidents’ Trophy. The following year was a different story, with Hellebuyck settling back toward the middle and the Jets missing the playoffs.
Sorokin’s numbers were stronger. The Islanders’ franchise goalie played 55 games last season and finished with a 2.68 GAA, a .906 SV%, 25.30 goals saved above expected and a Vezina Trophy nomination. He did it behind an Islanders team that was mostly inconsistent during the final year of Patrick Roy.
This season, Sorokin has pushed the bar even higher. In eight games under the Peter DeBoer regime, he’s at a 2.26 SV% and a .919 SV%.
That’s the standard Hellebuyck has to chase if he wants to claim he’s objectively better than Sorokin.
There’s also the matter of what elite goaltending does - and doesn’t - solve. A star in net can give a team a real lift, but only so much if the skaters in front of him aren’t doing their part.
The Islanders already have that boost with Sorokin. The Devils are hoping Hellebuyck can provide the same.
But the league has already shown how far a goalie can carry a flawed roster. The New York Rangers had Igor Shesterkin for the last two seasons and still fell short of the playoffs.
Now that Shesterkin is done for the season, they’ve started regressing back to the mean.
The Devils are dealing with their own issues, too. They’ve been inconsistent this season, which is why GM Sunny Mehta had to eat his hat and trade for Hellebuyck.
Meanwhile, the Islanders were lucky to already have Sorokin in the organization. That kept them from needing to swing for a huge goalie deal. With Semyon Varlamov looking to have defied gravity, the Islanders suddenly look like they have one of the NHL’s most enviable goaltending situations.
So while the Devils get the headline-grabbing addition, the Islanders may still have the better goalie right now. Hellebuyck will need a ridiculous run to prove otherwise and drag New Jersey into the playoffs. In the Metro, that’s a lot of ground to cover.
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The bigger marker came in overtime, where Schaefer was on the ice for the full five-minute sequence, a rare workload for any defenseman in todays NHL. For an Islanders team still trying to find its footing in the standings, seeing a young blueliner trusted that heavily in a tight game says plenty about how quickly hes becoming central to what they do. [Read more 🡒]