You know, the thing a lot of people who have given up on Mrazek overlook is that the guy had two relatively solid playoff outings, as a young kid playing behind a lousy defense to boot. The second time he put up better numbers than the year before despite coming off a rough regular season and then coming in cold in relief of the floundering Howard, once again posting an underwhelming playoff performance.
And that’s the thing that sticks out to me about Mrazek and makes me think we’re not giving him a fair shot. I think someone who can come in and play well in those big pressure games has something in him worth fighting for. I’m not going to defend his play in the previous couple seasons; it’s been lousy. But from many reports we heard that he’s been working hard behind the scenes and been focused, and he’s shown strong moments at times this season already. But he’s not getting any sort of consistenty. You can’t sit there and honestly say a goalie is getting a fair chance to get his game going when he’s going 3-4 weeks between starts. How don’t care how much you might believe the guy is done here, it’s ludicrous to say that any goalie is getting a fair shot when they’re getting next to no games. Ask any goalie and they’ll tell you that’s an incredibly hard position to be in.
They’ve already decimated his trade value enough through mishandling the situation, and it’s weaker yet with Edmonton picking up Montoya tonight. There really is very little to lose giving him some more consistent starts for awhile to see if he can’t string something together. We’re not a team that’s ready to do anything in the playoffs. Truly, why not see what he could do this year if given more starts? No player has more upside if they were to come around. When little else is working and the playoffs or success in them are a pipe dream, there’s literally nothing to lose giving this guy a more reasonable shot. He may continue to be terrible, but on that slight chance he’s not, it could be a.big break for us.
And again, Mrazek has gone 2-2 on strong NHL playoff performances, and end of the day, Howard’s never been a strong playoff goalie. You should not walk away from that kind of potential so easily when there’s so little to lose in a season like this.