By Tony Abbott -
If you're looking for one piece of 20-year-old pop culture to describe the Minnesota Wild's start to the season, it's easily Michael Scott looking stone serious into the camera and declaring, "No question about it, I am ready to get hurt again."
It's October 23, just six games into the season, but you can unironically look at this team and go, The Wild are a wagon. It's not even just you buying in on this. The media is in on them. The players are in on themselves. And, frankly, until they spend a second trailing on the scoreboard, why shouldn't they be?
You can point to several reasons for the Wild's strong start. Their top two lines are out-scoring opponents at an 11-to-1 clip at 5-on-5 through six games. Minnesota's power play is just that: powerful, converting at a 33.3% clip that's fourth in the NHL.
But the biggest reason is the guy between the pipes: Filip Gustavsson. The "Gus Bus" is traveling at a pace not seen since 1994, and he's not just kept Minnesota in games but has allowed them to win comfortably. Five starts in, and the 26-year-old goaltender still hasn't surrendered three or more goals in a game. His last four starts have seen him hold his opponents to one goal during regulation.
We know a small sample size when we see one here at Hockey Wilderness, and yes, of course, these are small sample shenanigans. There are no .950 goalies in the NHL, and definitely not in recent years, where the league save percentage has dropped below .900.
Still, it makes you wonder: Is the Gus Bus back? Can the Wild trust him to lead this team back to the postseason after being perhaps the biggest reason they missed last year?
Five games isn't enough to determine that, but what about 85? That's the number of starts that Gustavsson has in a Wild uniform, and in those two-plus seasons, the Swedish netminder has put up some of the best numbers in the NHL. Here are the top-10 goalies (minimum 2000 minutes) in save percentage at that time:
- Linus Ullmark, .927
- Connor Hellebuyck, .921
- Jeremy Swayman, .917
- Ilya Sorokin, .917
- FILIP GUSTAVSSON, .917
- Igor Shesterkin, .915
- Joey Daccord, .914
- Jake Oettinger, .914
- Semyon Varlamov, .913
- Juuse Saros, .912
That's good company. Really good company. The problem is that Gustavsson's numbers have oscillated between extremes. A .931 save percentage in 2022-23 is doing some heavy lifting for him, and his save percentage from last season drags him down. Hockey coaches value consistency, and Gustavsson's season-long slump devalues an otherwise top-10 goalie performance from the past several years.
So it's not surprising to see Gustavsson on a heater early in the season. He's done it before, for longer. Until he proves he can be consistent, the question will always be whether he can limit the damage when things start going wrong.
That was a huge problem last season. He was prone to bad showings and meltdowns, where Gustavsson lost his composure and control of the game. We can find several examples of this. Against the Toronto Maple Leafs on October 14, he surrendered three goals in 2 minutes, 20 seconds in the third period of a game where Minnesota lost 6-4. The Wild had to overcome a 3-0 first-period deficit on November 4 against the New York Rangers after he allowed three goals in the game's first seven minutes.
They dropped two crucial divisional games to the Nashville Predators, with the game turning on a brief but impactful Gustavsson meltdown. On January 25, the Predators erased a 1-0 lead heading into the third period with two goals in 35 seconds. The Wild lost 3-2. How do you top that? By allowing two goals in eight seconds on February 29, which turned a one-goal lead in the first period to the spark for a 6-1 blowout.
We're not seeing that this year, even in moments where Wild fans held their breath, waiting for things to unravel. In the St. Louis Blues game, Mathieu Joseph broke the scoring open with under 10 minutes left to make it 3-1.
Minnesota turned the puck over a little over a minute later, and St. Louis took a 3-on-2 back Gustavsson's way. Robert Thomas, who had 26 goals and 86 points last season, shot the puck -- but Gustavsson deflected it. Crisis averted. He put out the fire.
A similar dynamic happened in his second win against the Columbus Blue Jackets. He lost the shutout with 85 seconds left to make the game 3-1, but when Kirill Marchenko took the Jackets' last shot with 36 seconds to go, Gustavsson limited the damage. Last night in Florida, Sam Bennett got on the board in the middle of the second period, but Gustavsson shut the door completely in Minnesota's 5-1 win.
As is often the case with the Wild, you have to give credit to their defense. They're allowing 1.8 expected goals per hour at 5-on-5, blocking shots, and making life much easier for Gustavsson. Then again, the Wild were the best team in hockey at suppressing expected goals last season, and look what that did for the Gus Bus, then.
We can get caught up in recency bias, and just as easy as it was for the 2023-24 season to sour Wild fans on Gustavsson, this hot start could easily be coloring our feelings about him now. And even if the defense keeps being this stingy, and Gustavsson stays locked in, he won't be close to a .952 goalie at the end of the season.
Still, it looks like he's figured out how to stop the bleeding when things go wrong, and his overall career save percentage is far from anything to sneeze at. You (and the Wild) can absolutely get hurt again, but it feels like it's time to go all-in on the Gus Bus.
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