We’re back at it with the player reviews and we start off this Friday with Andrei Vasilevskiy. It took a bit longer for him to make his debut, but once he did, he was a fixture in the line-up, amassing 52 starts and picking up 30 wins along the way. Was it a good season for the Big Cat? Well, it wasn’t a bad one.
The Basics
Name: Andrei Vasilevskiy
Position: Goaltender
Counting Stats: 52 Games, 30 Wins, 20 Losses, 2 OT/SO losses, 2.90 GAA, .900 SV%, 0.03 GSAx
2023-24 Contract: Year 4 of his 8-year, $76 million deal
Contract Status: Signed through 2027-28 with a $9.5 million cap hit
The Charts
The Review
From the get-go it was a weird season for Andrei Vasilevskiy. After starting training camp on the sidelines, he quickly underwent back surgery in late September, delaying the start of his season until the end of November. Once he was back in the line-up, the Bolts didn’t hesitate to start him as he led the league in appearances from November 24th (his first game back) until the end of the season with 52.
Goaltenders are hard to judge even when they’re perfectly healthy, so looking for signs that he was back to his normal self wasn’t easy. It didn’t help that the players in front of him occasionally took a casual interest in things like playing actual defense. Keeping the puck out of the net is a total team effort, even for the best goaltenders in the world.
After dropping three of the first four games he played in, the Lightning won seven of the next nine contests, with Vasy posting a .925 SV% and 2.32 GAA. Then they dropped four of the next five and allowed 18 goals over that stretch, low-lighted by the weird Boston game where he allowed six goals on twenty-five shots.
That kicked off a 12-game stretch where he played his most consistent hockey of the season, picking up 10 wins with a .915 SV% and a 2.41 GAA, eclipsing a .900 SV% in 10 of those games. Considering the fact that the blueline was ravaged with injuries in front of him over that stretch, it helped that he had returned to form when the team needed him the most.
He closed out the season with some bad starts (6 goals allowed on 22 shots against Florida), some solid starts (47 saves on 50 shots, also against Florida) and in the end had, by his standards anyway, a rather pedestrian season. All of his counting stats were career worsts and in the end he couldn’t dig the team out of the defensive hole they had created all season long.
Over those last few months, he was extremely sharp shorthanded. From the end of January to the end of the season (27 games), he posted a .913 save percentage (3rd in the league) with a 6.47 GSAx (3rd in the league). Those numbers helped the Bolts to one of the best penalty kill percentages in the league. It also masked an average performance at even strength where he posted the 38th best save percentage among skates who faced at least 400 unblocked shot attempts.
In his exit interview Vasilevskiy mentioned that missing training camp did lead to some of the inconsistency he experienced throughout the season referring to that time as “the foundation for the whole season”.
He played well in the playoffs, when he wasn’t getting run into, but not quite as well as Sergei Bobrovsky and the Bolts went home in the first round. Vasy mentioned that the series was a lot closer than it seemed with the games decided by “one goal here, one goal there”.
Going forward, the good news is that he should get a full off-season to finish recovering from his back surgery and the long season. He turns 30 in the next few days and realizes that he can’t do the things he did as a 22-year-old in order to prepare for a season. If nothing else, the injury last summer has shown him that.
Could we finally see a full season where he’s only playing 50-55 games? Possibly. Finding those extra days of rest will be big as he finishes off the back-half of his contract. There were enough signs last season that he can still be among the elite at his position in the league. If the Lightning are serious about making it deep in the playoffs, finding a schedule that keeps him sharp but rested will be one of the biggest factors for next season.
Previous Reviews
