He's the easygoing symbol of the sport's most improbable team success story ever.
“I thought I was gonna get scored on a lot. ‘Let it go,’ right”?
Marc-Andre Fleury told a few of us reporters that after the inaugural Save Streak competition at the All-Star Game in Tampa this past January. He’d selected “Let it Go,” the signature song from Disney’s Frozen, to play while he faced shooters. And of course the guy who cared the least, who had the most fun, who sported the biggest smile, ended up stopping the most pucks and winning the whole darned thing.
It was a microcosm of Fleury’s season, which has oozed irony at every turn. The player deemed expendable after losing his starting job to Matt Murray, the player who earned his past two Stanley Cup rings from the bench, is now the Conn Smythe Trophy frontrunner. The goaltender known in recent years for a supposed lack of playoff prowess is having the best post-season run since at least Jonathan Quick in 2012 and probably since Jean-Sebastien Giguere in 2003. Instead of joining what we all predicted would be a ridiculous sideshow in Vegas, Fleury’s having the best season, wire-to-wire, of his 14-year career, and he’s fuelling what may be the most improbable team success story in major sports history. Seriously, if Vegas wins six more games, how can we not put this team ahead of the Miracle on Ice and Leicester City? The 1980 U.S. Olympians had to win six games to capture gold. Leicester City won the English Premier League – but imagine if that meant playing seven-game series against four other top teams and needing 16 more victories to be named champion. Vegas, meanwhile, had 109 points when the previous NHL expansion record was 83 and are 10 victories deep in the playoffs when no other expansion team in any major North American pro sport had even posted a winning record in the regular season for more than five decades.
Fleury has been the poster child for this run, and Game 3 of the Western Conference final showcased all the best sides of him. In the middle of a scrum, he tickled the back of Jets captain Blake Wheeler’s ear. Yes, tickled. Fleury said he did it because everyone was jostling, he felt left out, and he wanted a laugh. The same guy who did that…did this to Mark Scheifele, twice:
Robbery like that earned Fleury first-star honors. Immediately after the game, he spent time in his stall with the two sons of late Humboldt Broncos coach Darcy Haugan. That’s Fleury, and for any readers and fans who ask why we media folks gush about him so much – it’s because he’s doing stuff like that every day, especially in his community outreach. It goes well beyond what happens on camera, too.
There may be no teammate in hockey more beloved. Five years ago, after a Pittsburgh Penguins’ morning skate, I was speaking to right winger Pascal Dupuis when a scrum of reporters approached to talk about that night’s game. “No, no,” Dupuis said, waving them off. “We’re talking about something completely different.” He was in the middle of pouring his heart out on the man everyone calls ‘Flower.’ Dupuis wanted to finish his train of thought. Talk to any people close to Fleury and they’ll wax poetic on his virtues as long as you want.
“He has the ability to constantly take the pulse of the dressing room,” said Allan Walsh, Fleury’s longtime agent. “He picks up guys that are down. He makes young guys feel comfortable. He relieves high-pressure situations by cracking a joke, pulling off a prank or just doing something silly that makes people laugh. He’s always smiling. He has no ego. Flower brings passion and joy to his game. He plays for the team and his teammates. His attitude and work ethic rub off on everyone around him. He makes other players better because teammates don’t want to let him down. That’s a key ingredient of Flower’s secret sauce.”
When I spoke with Fleury in the days and weeks after the Golden Knights selected him with the final pick of the 2017 expansion draft, I asked how he felt about being the face of the franchise, and he quickly dismissed the idea. As I said at the time, however, that very modesty is why he was always destined to become the face of the Golden Knights. And if he becomes the face of a championship team, he may punch his Hall of Fame ticket. He doesn’t have a Vezina to his name, but a Conn Smythe, four Cup rings and a possible top-three or even top-two finish on the league’s all-time wins list would make it tough to deny Fleury. It’s also human beings voting on Hall spots, lest we forget, and his personality certainly doesn’t hurt his chances.
“People have asked me over the years whether Flower is really as nice a guy as he seems on TV,” Walsh said. “Having represented him since he was 15 years old, I can honestly say – I’m kind of in awe of the guy, and I’ve known him for more than half his life.”
Dustin Byfuglien may have single-handedly owned a scrum during Game 3 between the Vegas Golden Knights and Winnipeg Jets, but it was Marc-Andre Fleury who tried his best to keep the fight light-hearted.
There's not really any other way to explain why the Vegas goalie and former Pittsburgh Penguins fan favorite contributed to the scuffle with ... a tickle of Jets forward Blake Wheeler's ear.
When asked after Wednesday's game for his own explanation, according to Steve DelVecchio, Fleury apparently gave little reason except he felt like "having a smile" during a moment of chaos.
What can we deduct from that? Either the Golden Knights net-minder just likes watching the world burn a la the Joker, he doesn't care for fighting or, most likely, he was just happy with how Wednesday's affair -- a 4-2 victory for Vegas to give his team a 2-1 conference finals lead -- played out.
Fleury and the Golden Knights will try to take one step closer to the Stanley Cup Final in Game 4 on Friday, with the puck set to drop at 8 p.m. ET.
Headed into Friday’s Game 4 of the Western Conference final, Marc-Andre Fleury’s save percentage in the postseason is .945.
Here now is a full list of goalies who played at least 13 games in a postseason since the salary cap was instituted, and posted a save percentage of at least .945: Marc-Andre Fleury and Jonathan Quick.
That’s it. That’s the total number of goalies who have played at this level for this long in the last 12 years of playoff hockey. Jonathan Quick, you’ll recall, won a Stanley Cup playing like this, because he went .946 over 20 games — a hell of a lot more work than what Fleury’s had to do so far — and at this point there doesn’t seem like a particularly big chance Fleury suddenly stops playing world-beating hockey.
Obviously Fleury was great in the regular season for the Golden Knights but he has brought his game — and his team as a whole — to an entirely different level in the postseason. Even when the Penguins went to the Cup Final in 2007-08, when Fleury was spectacular, he didn’t approach this level of performance.
But what’s different with Fleury now and Quick? Shouldn’t come as any great surprise here, but the answer is “Vegas isn’t as good as those Kings were.”
Quick was great in 2012, for sure, but let’s be honest: Those Kings were the kings of shot suppression and really made his life relatively easy. Based on expected-goals numbers from that postseason, Quick was supposed to give up about 28 goals at 5-on-5 and 42.6 overall. In reality, he gave up just 23 and 29 in the Kings’ run to their first of two Stanley Cups. Clearly he made his money — “10 more years of our goalie” etc. etc. etc. — on special teams, but the numbers clearly suggest that Quick didn’t spend a lot of time under duress.
The team in front of him only gave up 26 shots per 60 minutes of ice time over the whole playoff run, which is an incredible number. Of those 26, only 4.5 were from high-danger areas, and to his credit, Quick carried a very-solid .828 on high-danger chances in all situations.
Story Continues
Now let’s look at Fleury’s numbers. Vegas gives up about 31 shots per 60 minutes overall, of which 5.1 are high-danger. That’s a very solid job limiting shots on goal from in close by Vegas, but where Quick was excellent on those scary shots, Fleury is other-worldly, at .853.
Marc-Andre Fleury has taken his play and his team to another level in the postseason. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
These same numbers apply to medium-danger shots, too, only the gap between Fleury and Quick here gets worse. Quick faced a little more than 10 outside scoring chances per 60, while Fleury is closer to 15. That makes a pretty good-sized difference in terms of expected save percentages.
Put simply, Fleury has been both a lot busier and a good amount better.
Indeed, he’s only “supposed to” be stopping about .912 in all situations right now. For reference, going about .912 would put him somewhere between Andrei Vasilevskiy and Devan Dubnyk in terms of performance in these playoffs, which is fine but not heroic or anything. Fleury is 33 points(!) above that level.
When Quick won his first Cup, the difference between expected and actual save percentage was “only” 25 points. And to be clear, 25 points is a huge amount, but when you’re expected to be .921 in all situations, your team is making it very, very easy for you. To put it in perspective, Quick was only supposed to have given up about 5.5 more goals in seven extra games. That’s a huge difference in shot quality faced.
Among goalies with at least 800 minutes across all sitautions since 2007-08, Fleury’s is the second-largest difference between expected and actual save percentage, behind only Jonas Hiller’s .943 versus .909 expected from 2008-09. Hiller’s team also lost in seven games in the second round to the juggernaut Red Wings — the best team of the Behind the Net era and it’s not even close — after beating the extremely high-scoring Sharks in the first round.
So in terms of all-time great postseason performances for this era, Fleury is probably having the second- or maybe third-best run we’ve seen in a very long time.
This all comes with the caveat that it’s only 13 games, and just because you were amazing for 13 games doesn’t mean you will continue to be amazing for however many games you might think you have left, especially if Winnipeg continues to play the way it did after going down 2-1 in Game 3.
But Fleury’s play to this point has been such that even if you could say L.A. or San Jose presented a threat to him or Vegas, it ended up not mattering. Likewise, Winnipeg is quickly getting to the end of its runway — two losses away, and yes that was a plane joke — and while you can say, “Ah look at all those goals they almost scored, though,” almost-scoring goals doesn’t get you very far in a short series.
At this point we’re so far into the pocket on this that there shouldn’t even be a Conn Smythe ballot. Fleury has allowed more goals than expected in just four of his team’s 13 games so far and in another he was right on the money. Mathematically, that’s “stealing” like 70 percent of the games played, especially because Vegas has gotten seven of its 10 wins either by a goal or a goal plus an empty-netter. That includes four straight one-goal wins over the Kings.
The extent to which Fleury has been The Difference for this team — even with how incredibly well that top line has performed — cannot be oversold. He isn’t the only reason the team is two wins away from a Cup Final as an expansion team, but he’s so far ahead of the No. 2 reason that it looks like a dot on the horizon, barely there at all.
I’d probably give him the Conn Smythe regardless of how the rest of this series goes. Unless he gives up a touchdown in three straight games, one imagines he’ll never be able to come close to tarnishing what he’s done so far.
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
All stats via Corsica unless otherwise noted.
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