Tuukka Rask Hits 300 Wins and Still Doesn’t Get the Recognition He Deserves
Have you ever been driving down the street in the New England area while listening to sports radio when Gary from Leominster calls in to tell you that Tuukka Rask is a bum and needs to be traded?
I have. This article is for you, Gary.
How do we measure great players throughout history? If we are like Gary from Leominster we might say that great players are judged by the number of rings they have. That’s fair I guess. However, by that logic Jarome Iginla, Joe Thornton, Paul Kariya, Daniel Sedin, Henrik Sedin, Eric Lindros and Henrik Lundqvist are not great players.
How about one that hits closer to home? Using the same logic that would mean Cam Neely was not a great player. Neely scored fifty goals in a season on one leg, but he finished his career without a Stanley Cup so he’s terrible, right? Wrong. I’ve never once heard a Bruins fan utter a negative word about the playing career of Neely. So why, then is Rask judged so harshly by fans?
The stellar play of Tim Thomas in 2011 is a blessing and a curse in the life of Rask. For one it got Rask a ring and his name on the Stanley Cup. At the same time, it has been a curse because since 2011 fans can’t help but compare every single performance Rask has ever had to the 2011 postseason of Thomas. That certainly is an unfair comparison. You are most likely never going to see another goalie allow only eight goals in a seven-game Stanley Cup Finals.
The thing is that Rask isn’t the same goalie as Thomas. Rask is a better goalie than Thomas. For one, he has the most wins by a goalie in franchise history. On April 15, 2021, Rask recorded his 300th win, which no goalie in the nearly 100-year history of the Boston Bruins franchise has ever done. It took Rask 552 games to hit that milestone, the fifth-fewest in NHL history.
Let’s look at some more numbers.
According to a quick Google search, .915% is the ideal save percentage for a goaltender. The league average sits somewhere around .910%. Anything below .900% is subpar. Currently, Rask has a career save percentage of .922. That puts him at number two all time. The only guy ahead of him is Dominik Hasek who, at the moment, has played 183 more games than Rask. Coming in at number three after Rask is Ken Dryden. From what I’ve been told, both of those goalies were pretty good. The only difference is that Dryden wasn’t facing goal scorers like Sidney Crosby, Alex Ovechkin and Auston Matthews.
Now let’s look at goals against average (GAA). If we compare Rask to every goalie in NHL history he sits at number 11 all-time with a GAA of 2.27. Six of those 11 goalies were born before the year 1911 though, so I’m not sure we even want to count those. Two of the netminders above Rask are Dryden and Martin Brodeur.
Still, for guys like Gary in Leominster, the narrative around Rask will always be the same. They’ll claim he’s not clutch by saying he never shows up for big games despite the fact that he carried the Bruins to the Cup Final in 2019 when the first line couldn’t score. In Game 7, Brad Marchand left the ice in the middle of a play in the first period allowing St. Louis to score, but somehow receives none of the blame.
They’ll say that he abandons his team when he leaves the playoff bubble to take care of his young daughter who’s the hospital during a pandemic.
And they’ll say he’s not a winner despite being consistently elite for the better part of a decade.
History will remember Rask correctly though. In my mind, he is easily a hall of fame goaltender. I would even make the argument that he deserves to have his number retired by the Bruins. There are a few numbers already hanging in the rafters at TD Garden, some of whom, unlike Rask, don’t have a ring with Boston.
We should be grateful that we’ve had such strong goaltending for so long. Elite goalies like Rask don’t grow on trees.