Ottawa Senators

Where does Anderson fit on pecking order?
August 9, 2017, 8:40 AM ET [12 Comments]
Jared Crozier
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It is no secret that I have always felt Craig Anderson has been over-rated by Senators fans. I have argued with a lot of people who think he is a top 5 or top 10 goalie in the league over the last couple of years. I think a lot of fans in most cities overvalue what they have and it affects that opinion, but that is what being a fan of your team is about.

At his best, he can be among the best in the game, but normal Craig Anderson is not an elite goalie, and in my mind not in the top half of goalies in the league. There are simply too many bad goals against, and at inopportune times to consider him elite. The mountains may be high, but the valleys are very low if you were to graph his performance over the course of a season.

NHL.com and the NHL Network came out with their goalie rankings on the weekend, rating their top 10 and added 5 honorable mentions, and Anderson was not on either list.

For the record, their top 10 was:

Price
Holtby
Bobrovsky
Murray
Dubnyk
Quick
Talbot
Lundqvist
Jones
Rinne

and their 5 HM were Schneider, Gibson, Crawford, Rask and Bishop.

Fair enough, I might quarrel with some of the placements on the list, but I am not sure I would put Anderson ahead of any of them, making him at best 16th, and even then there are still some names like Luongo, Andersen, Vasilevskiy in the Atlantic Division alone that would arguably be rated ahead of Anderson.

Anderson became the franchise leader in games played and wins this past season, but is he the best goalie that the Senators have had in their franchise?

Anderson has finished with Vezina Trophy votes one time, finishing 4th in voting in 2012-13. Patrick Lalime finished 5th in 2002-03 and 9th in 2000-01 as a member of the Senators, joining Ron Tugnutt (5th in 1998-99) and Dominik Hasek (7th in 2006-06) and Andrew Hammond (7th in 2014-15) as the only Ottawa netminders to get Vezina votes.

Lalime will always be remembered for the game 7 meltdown that led to his departure following the 2004 playoffs, but leading up to that he was considered a quality goalie, and I remember Senators fans inundating the TEAM1200 airwaves with rage when The Hockey News came out with a top 5 ranking of goalies and Lalime was not mentioned.

It is tough to compare a goalie from a different era, because Lalime had a much better team in front of him in those latter years, where they would have been considered legitimate Stanley Cup contenders if they could have just gotten past the Blue and White.

I would say Anderson is probably the best goalie the Senators have had, (aside from the 3/4 of a season of Hasek where we all learned about the adductor muscle for the first time) , but that is for the most part the best of a bad lot and the Senators still have not had a truly elite goalie in his prime, now going on for more than a quarter of a century.