Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Luongo

This post is going to anger a lot of Vancouver Canucks fans.

Luongo is no longer living up to the character that the vancouver media has made. In his first season in Vancouver, he was tremendous. Top 3 goalies in the league, and a vezina nominee. But last year, he looked iffy. He had a lot of excuses; these are the most common ones that we hear
-he was injured.
-his wife was pregneant and was dealing with the complexities of becoming a father
-the canucks defence was badly injured.
So because of this, we excuse his poor numbers from last season (save percentage 14th in the league, GAA 13th in the league).

But this year he does not have an excuse. He started the season of really well, with a shutout against the flames. But since that night, he has been shaky again. Letting in goals that are alright to let in, but goals that superstar goalies should be saving. There are a lot of commentators out there, that are still insisting that Luongo is one of the premiere goalies in the league. I am not that convinced. A further analysis into his numbers in florida will be my next analysis, which i will post later this week.

But in the meantime, lets look at his numbers for this season so far. For both GAA and Save percentage, he is 24th in the league. His rank is a little inflated, because teams have been playing multiple goalies to start off the season. Nevertheless, Luongo is supposed to be a vezina candidate. We are paying him 6.75 million dollars a season, to deliver Martin Brodeur numbers, and not Dwayne Roloson numbers. The canucks have very little offense this season, we rely on our goalie to win us games. He's not doing that for us.

The Canucks gave Luongo the C for a reason. He's gotta step up and start winning games for them. The rest of the team can rally behind that type of leadership. The canucks only hope for making the playoffs this season, is a vezina type year from Luongo. He's got to game his game together. He's got to start winning games for the canucks. We can't be relying on Burrows and Kesler to do that, although it does help quite a bit. If Luongo can't get it together, he will eventually be another name to add to the vancouver canucks goalie graveyard.

-hark

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