Your Montreal Canadiens are surprising us all and pushing for a playoff spot in just the fourth season of this rebuild under Kent Hughes, Jeff Gorton, and Martin St-Louis. Realistically, it’s actually less, since they took over halfway through the disastrous 2021-22 campaign. A big part of the reason has been the goaltending of one Samuel Montembeault, but the general opinion of the Habs’ starting goaltender is lukewarm, with questions about whether he should be playing less.
Do me a favour if you can, and jump down to the comments right away, and quickly jot down your impressions of Montembeault between the following categories:
One of
- Elite goaltender
- Starting goaltender
- 1A tandem goaltender
- 1B tandem goaltender
- Backup goaltender
And one of
- Above average
- Average
- Below average
The aim is to simply describe how you view him as a goaltender among his peers in the NHL. When you’re done, hit comment and get back up here so we can dig in.
The Stats
You always knew this is where I’d start, right? We’re doing a little deep dive on our buddy Montembeault. This year, it feels like Montembeault has really struggled with consistency. It’s not necessarily that he’s been bad, but that he hasn’t felt like the pretty safe bet to hold a defensively vulnerable Montreal Canadiens team in games he has started. Let’s start by comparing Montembeault to himself as a Hab using Evolving-Hockey‘s numbers, specifically two different metrics: Goals Saved Above Average (GSAA), which is a measure of a goaltender’s save percentage relative to league average because that fluctuates over time, and Goals Saved Above Expectations (GSAx), which uses Evolving Hockey’s expected goals model to create a delta for a goaltender’s goals saved above or below expectations based on the quality of shots he faces.
Based on the data at a glance, Montembeault is a goaltender who will be prone to wildly different evaluations depending on the biases of the viewer. Let’s go through the totals first. By traditional statistics, Montembeault is on his fourth-straight season with the Canadiens with a below-league-average save percentage, meaning he’s giving up more goals than an average goaltending performance.
After 15 years of watching Carey Price with the CH emblazoned across his chest, managing games while doing the impossible, it’s natural for Habs fans to be overly harsh when it comes to goaltending.
Adjusting for the shots he’s faced, he has consistently been above average, showing improvement each year. The Canadiens are a leaky defensive team in the midst of a rebuild, even if they’re surprising us all this year with a playoff push, and Montembeault’s performance has to be adjusted for that reality.
With that said, totals can be deceiving, because they don’t account for ice time, so let’s track over the right side of the graph where I’ve adjusted for the minutes Montembeault has played each season, where he had already hit a career high by over 560 minutes by Thursday night, or an extra 9.37 games played with 11 games remaining at the time of writing.
What we find is much the same, but instead of an improvement year-to-year, it’s actually sparkling consistency over the last three seasons. Seen in total, since 2022-23 Montembeault has saved the Canadiens about 0.44 goals per 60 minutes played, which totals up, per Evolving Hockey, to 56.79 goals saved above expectations.
Care to guess where that ranks him? If you were so bold as to say fifth in the entire NHL among goaltenders, sandwiched between Linus Ullmark and Juuse Saros, give yourself a high five. Montembeault is even ahead of money goaltenders like Jake Oettinger, Andrei Vasilevskiy, and Jeremy Swayman.
So what gives? Are we all imagining things? Are we being unreasonable in our expectations with Montembeault? It’s tough to argue against his body of work over the last three seasons, however the wide glance doesn’t exactly feel true to watching Montembeault game in and game out either. He is a goaltender that can have big variances in performance, even within the same game, even if on balance he is much better than most of his peers.
So let’s go in a slightly different direction and look at the frequency of Montembeault’s performances using Rob Vollman’s Quality Starts and Really Bad Starts metrics from Hockey Reference, and graph out what these seasons look like.
While the whole picture tells the more important story, binning Montembeault’s starts by quality performance each year gives us a look at why this year has felt so off. Even during the 2021-22 season when the Canadiens were a total mess and Montembeault was playing injured, only 18% of his starts drifted into the really bad territory, he just wasn’t able to accumulate many quality starts, which pulled down his save percentage.
The following year in 2022-23 he managed to give a slightly above-average quality start rate on a bad team, but also saw more really bad starts. The overall trend was incredibly positive though, and the 2023-24 season was even better, putting up 70% of his starts as quality ones, the rate of Vezina contenders (Connor Hellebuyck is ~75%). At the same time, Montembeault’s really bad starts dropped to a career low.
This year, overall the goals saved above expected might be about the same, but Montembeault has been a lot more Jekyll & Hyde in goal, with fewer quality starts, more average starts, and the highest frequency of really bad starts we’ve ever seen from him.
What this means is that Montembeault’s quality starts have been really high quality, otherwise you would expect his numbers to truly plummet.
So we’re not all crazy, Montembeault’s 13 really bad starts this season are tied for the second-most in the NHL with Samuel Ersson, and trailing only Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen. It could be that the higher workload is affecting Montembeault, and that would track with his performance coming back from the 4 Nations Face-Off. He was brilliant for a stretch, but seems to have lost a bit of focus now.
Workload Matters
Back in the day when I was working for Sportlogiq and doing those big “Top-20” players by position and trying to do my best to measure total impact on the game for Sportsnet, I came up with a sort of ballpark measurement for how much workload a goaltender was facing, combining ice time, shot volume, shot quality, dangerous passes against, team rebound recovery, a goaltender’s own rebound control, goal support, and the percent of starts a goaltender is healthy for that a team chooses to start them.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that every year Carey Price topped that list. I don’t have access to all that data anymore, but many of the inputs are available now, and I think we can all agree that Montembeault faces a pretty tough workload most games.
I don’t think it should be surprising that a goaltender whose career high in the NHL was 40 starts last year has seen some bumps in the road while on pace to get 59 starts, especially with the high level of action he’s seeing every game. And while Price was the undisputed king of rebound control, Montembeault’s rebound placement often adds to his own workload.
Despite what some may assume, Montembeault has still been quite a bit better at keeping the Habs in games this season on average than Jakub Dobeš, but the gap is not enough to weigh the workload down the stretch so heavily in Montembeault’s favour. Trusting the new kid is important to give the starter some rest.
In The Shadow of Greatness
After 15 years of watching Carey Price with the CH emblazoned across his chest, managing games while doing the impossible, it’s natural for Habs fans to be overly harsh when it comes to goaltending. We have a rich history of era-defining goaltenders.
Compared to Price’s calming influence through both his stopping efficiency and his straight up control of the flow of games, Montembeault is a very different kind of starting goaltender. But not being Carey Price doesn’t mean that Montembeault isn’t up to the task.
What that task is might be different for each fan, but I’d like to offer the perspective that Monty is not only one of the better tandem starters in the league, he’s also a player that has sacrificed to play when the club needed it despite injury without so much as a complaint, cost the team nothing to acquire, and for the last three seasons has given the Canadiens top-third goaltending while being at most the 32nd-highest paid goaltender in the NHL.
The Canadiens also have a tradition of goaltenders who never become outright stars, but they play like stars in Montreal, from Steve Penney to Jeff Hackett. I’m of the opinion that Jacob Fowler is the goaltender of the future in Montreal, but the goaltender of right now is not one to turn your nose up at.
Alright, now go reply to your own comment if your opinion changed at all.
Andrew Berkshire is the former managing editor of Eyes on the Prize, and the founder of Game Over Network Inc. A Canadian, employee-owned sports media startup focused on platforming young creators across the country. Find Andrew live on YouTube after Habs games with Game Over Montreal, where you can also find Marc Dumont, Kay Imam, and Conor Tomalty to bring you interactive postgame analysis. You can join the Game Over Network’s Discord, and support us on Patreon as we employ over 30 young sports journalists and analysts across Canada’s seven NHL markets.
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