While the stars are the big story in this upcoming series between the Vegas Golden Knights and the Edmonton Oilers, what may be the biggest X-factor is which team gets more stable goaltending.
Stuart Skinner has been the better option over Jack Campbell this season for Edmonton, but was shaky in the Oilers first round series against the Los Angeles Kings with an .890 save percentage.
Meanwhile, Laurent Brossoit has excelled behind Vegas’ systems, and managed to outduel Connor Hellebuyck with a .915 save percentage to give the Golden Knights the easy series win.
Both goalies have plenty of question marks though, especially as the competition will continue to get tougher as the playoffs go on. Frank Seravalli and Mike McKenna had Jason Gregor on Daily Faceoff Live to talk about the goaltending battle in this series.
Jason Gregor: Talking to some people, the one thing you’ll notice with Brossoit is that he’s got the shortest stick length, one of the shortest stick lengths in the league because he’s got really long arms. If his hands are down, I think Edmonton are going to try to shoot upstairs.
We saw as the series went on against Korpisalo, they really exposed him up top, especially if they came down the left side, they were shooting far side, and having quite a bit of success with it.
As for Skinner, you looked at L.A. early on, they were really attacking side-to-side, and I think Vegas is going to do more of an East-West dynamic offense because that’s where you’re going to have the most success against Skinner.
The thing is Edmonton has actually been pretty good defensively. If you look all year long at Sportlogiq and stuff, Edmonton has been a pretty good team on limiting high-quality chances.
I think Edmonton had the third best expected save percentage on high-danger chances of any team in the league, and usually that’s a stat that people will tell you that it’s a representative of a team that can go deep in the postseason. And they just beat the team that was above them in L.A. who was second.
I think Edmonton usually do a pretty good job of protecting their goalies overall, and I think that’s what they’re going to have to do, because I agree, Skinner hasn’t been great, but I liked how he bounced back after getting pulled in Game 4. I thought he looked much more controlled.
Obviously, Game 6 everybody knows the broken stick, but there’s nothing you can do with that, I don’t know how many games he’ll play in and never have a situation like that. But he didn’t get rattled, and that could have rattled a young guy, but he didn’t get rattled considering the time and situation of that goal, giving up a tying goal that time of the game shorthanded was brutal, but he didn’t waiver after that, I thought that was important.
You can watch the full episode here…
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