With an arbitration hearing past and a ruling looming, the Toronto Maple Leafs and goalie Jonathan Bernier managed to reach a compromise which worked for both parties on Sunday.
The two-year, $4.15 million/season contract represents a reasonable balance of risk and security, particularly given that it was agreed to in haste as a way of avoiding a deal imposed by an arbitrator.
It’s a good contract for the team, but it certainly isn’t a great one and arguably isn’t even an optimal one. Based on the terms Bernier eventually accepted, the Leafs had an opportunity here to secure a quality starter over the long haul at a reasonable price-point.
Instead, the team went for the lower-risk short-term deal, reducing potential downside but limiting upside in the likely event that Bernier plays well.
The arguments in favour of betting on Bernier are obvious. One of the most critical is age. He turns 27 later this week and is still reasonably young by NHL standards. Few goalies in that age range make great strides in performance, but in general they can be trusted to provide relatively stable minutes and, for the most part, the really steep declines that turn assets into liabilities don’t occur for at least another half-decade.
Bernier is also relatively proven as a major-league option. He has 175 NHL regular-season games under his belt, a substantial track record. He’s comfortably a No. 1 option; among the 60 goalies to play the most minutes since Bernier’s first full season (2010-11) he ranks 17th in war-on-ice.com’s shot quality-adjusted save percentage.
Better still, the gap separating him from a top-10 position is small, coming in at roughly one additional goal for every 1,000 shots.
With a young, yet proven starter, Toronto had a chance to ensure relative security at what is the least predictable and most critical position in hockey.
Even better, because Bernier was coming off a poor season, the Leafs had a chance to do it cheaply, and perhaps without an arbitrator’s decision looming they would have done so. As it is, they should be in good shape in net for the next two years and, if nothing else, Bernier will be a valuable trade asset for a rebuilding team.
That isn’t to say that no reason for concern exists.
Toronto’s management, with some justification, may not have felt entirely comfortable with Bernier after the season he just had. Following a standout debut as an NHL starter in which he went 26-19-7 with a .923 save percentage, Bernier saw all of his numbers decline in his second campaign with the Leafs. His save percentage fell to .912, his record dropped to 21-28-7 and he was a major contributor to Toronto’s embarrassing collapse in the second half of the season, a crash that dropped the team from the playoff bubble to league basement.
From January on, Bernier went just 6-20-4 and allowed 85 goals against on just 892 shots for a lousy .905 save percentage. That kind of run justifiably erodes confidence in a player, and it’s easy to understand why the Leafs opted for the circumspection of a two-year extension. In a sense, though, that 30-game stretch actually makes it easier to excuse Bernier’s struggles.
His collapse in net coincided with the replacement of Randy Carlyle as head coach. Peter Horachek, naturally, had his own views on the way the Leafs should play, and the adjustments he made resulted in a shift in the kinds of shots that Bernier and goaltending partner James Reimer faced. Both faced fewer shots overall and a lower percentage of what war-on-ice categorizes as “high quality” shots against.
The results were interesting. Reimer thrived under the new coach, with his five-on-five save percentage spiking from a wretched .902 at the start of the year to an excellent .923. But Bernier went in the opposite direction. His five-on-five save percentage under Carlyle was .940, a number that would have ranked him third overall in the NHL over the whole season, right behind Carey Price. Under Horachek, however, it was .910, which would have put him in Alex Stalock country.
Measuring goalie performance is difficult to do, and our current statistics do not adequately capture everything that’s going on.
However, the shift in the variables we do measure, as well as the massive performance shifts by both Reimer and Bernier at the exact moment of Horachek’s ascension suggest an altered defensive system and difficulty adapting to the new regime on the part of the incumbent starter.
If Bernier’s struggles were in fact triggered by an altered defensive approach, it’s reasonable to assume that they are a temporary setback, and that with a full training camp he will regain his excellent form of previous years.
In that case, the Leafs will enjoy good goaltending at a very reasonable price for two seasons, but will have cause for some regret that they didn’t find a way to get Bernier under contract for three or four years.