Stanley Cup Heroes, Part 11: Out of Nowhere
The Bruins may only have 1 Stanley Cup in the 21st century, but they’ve been a consistent threat the last 20 years. Many Bostonians have (wrongly) blamed goaltending for their lack of championships. It’s understandable when you look at the reason why they won their only Stanley Cup back in 2011. It was thanks to the single greatest outlier in NHL history.
In 2006, Tim Thomas was 32 years old. He had played just 42 NHL games and ranged from good to bad in that time. The 06-07 season looked like a make or break year for the goaltender. As the #1 goalie in Boston, Tim Thomas was bad. With recent acquisition Tukka Rask waiting in the wings, it seemed like the old man’s time in the NHL would be short.
So of course, he went on to become the best goalie in the NHL for the next 4 years. Among goalies with at least 50 games played from 2007 to 2011, Tim Thomas leads the pack with a save percentage of .928. The only goaltender within range is Tukka Rask, Thomas’s backup.
That may make you think he merely benefitted from a great team. While he was blessed to play with defensive monsters in Zdeno Chara and Patrice Bergeron, he was still the most important part of that team. In his magnum opus season, 2011, Tim Thomas put up a massive .938 save percentage as well as 39.6 goals saved above expected (GSaX).
For those that don’t know, GSaX is a metric that attempts to quantify how many goals a goalie would be expected to give up by calculating the chances of each shot becoming a goal. Having a positive GSaX means a goalie prevented more goals than expected, having a negative number means they gave up more goals than expected.
It’s not perfect and multiple sources have their own ways of calculating it. All you need to know is Tim Thomas put up the same GSaX (according to Moneypuck’s model) as Connor Helleybuyck did in his MVP season just last year in 6 less games.
Tim Thomas’s magnum opus wasn’t done after the regular season. In 25 playoff games (the 2nd most ever in a single season), Thomas put up a gargantuan .940 save percentage and 4 shutouts. 2 of those shutouts came in game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals and game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final. That made him the first goalie ever to put up multiple game 7 shutouts in the same playoff run. Only 1 goalie has matched it since.
Tim Thomas was obviously awarded the Conn Smythe for his efforts as playoff MVP. At the time, he was 37. That is how old Bobrovsky is right now. Thomas was out of the NHL just 3 years later. Tim Thomas is the single biggest and greatest outlier in NHL and maybe all of sports history. In 2011, he punctuated that claim to fame by becoming a Stanley Cup Hero.
