As it turns out, the Bruins do in fact miss Tuukka Rask quite a bit.
When Rask decided to leave the team a little over two weeks ago for a family emergency, and Jaroslav Halak stepped in and played well in the Bruins' Game 3 win over Carolina, a lot of us -- myself included -- convinced ourselves that Rask's departure wouldn't doom them and that they'd be OK with Halak.
It wasn't a crazy thought. Halak is a veteran who's been here before. He's been very good for the Bruins over the last two regular seasons. His career postseason numbers were also very good.
But we probably didn't fully appreciate just how difficult this would be for him, nor just how good Rask usually is in the playoffs.
Being very good in a No. 2 (or 1A if we're being generous) role in the regular season, when you play roughly every 5-6 days and opponents don't see you all that often, doesn't mean you're going to be very good in a No. 1 role in the playoffs, when you're playing every other night -- and sometimes back-to-back nights -- against an opponent that gets to study you, learn your habits and find your weaknesses.
Apparently leading the Canadiens on a great playoff run 10 years ago or playing well for the Islanders in a series five years ago means little in 2020.
It's been a long time since Halak has been in this position, so the fact that he's been inconsistent and hasn't looked completely comfortable shouldn't be all that surprising.
There have been some good games for sure -- Games 3 and 5 against the Hurricanes, and Game 1 of this series against the Lightning. But he's also allowed three or more goals in four of his seven starts and had a save percentage of .900 or worse in all four, including each of the last three.
Halak's .833 save percentage over the last two games led to a remarkable stat from Tucker Boynton, who pointed out that Rask has never had a save percentage that bad over any two-game stretch in his 93-game postseason career.
Jaroslav Halak's .833 save percentage over his last two starts is worse than any two-game stretch in Tuukka Rask's 93-game playoff career.
— Tucker Boynton (@Tucker_TnL) August 29, 2020The Hurricanes found a weakness with Halak's glove hand, and the Lightning have continued to exploit it. They've scored two glove-side goals on long, stoppable shots in the last two games, and their Game 2 overtime winner came after Halak failed to hold onto a shot that bounced off his glove and allowed Tampa to keep an offensive-zone possession alive.
That's the kind of problem that if it surfaces in the regular season, you have some time to work on it between starts. Whether it's your angles or your positioning or your actual glove hand itself, you can just face a bunch of glove-side shots until you start feeling confident again, and you don't really have to worry about overworking yourself if you know you're not starting for another four days.
You don't have that luxury in the playoffs. With such a compressed schedule, you're only doing very light work on the ice between starts, if any at all. You can watch video and maybe do a little bit of off-ice work, but it's not the same as facing live shots on the ice. Sometimes getting right back on the ice for another game proves to be the best solution, but it clearly hasn't been for Halak when it comes to his struggling glove.
It's also the kind of problem that Rask has generally avoided in the playoffs. That's not to say he hasn't had bad games or let in bad goals and even had bad series, because he has. But he's rarely given teams a consistent shortcut to the back of the net that they can exploit across multiple games or series, and he's rarely allowed bad games to pile up.
Over the last three postseasons prior to this year, Rask had nine games (out of a total of 42) in which he had a save percentage of .900 or worse. In the games following those performances, his save percentage was .931. With Rask, the Bruins pretty much knew they were going to get a bounce-back performance and not get two tough games in a row.
In 15 series as the Bruins' starting goalie in his career, Rask has had a save percentage of .920 or better in 10 of them. He's had a save percentage under .900, which is currently where Halak is in this series, in just two -- the infamous 3-0 collapse series against the Flyers back in 2010, and the first round against the Maple Leafs in 2018, a series the Bruins still won in seven games.
None of this is to say that Rask would've been great if he had stuck around for this postseason. If his mind was elsewhere and he wasn't as focused on hockey as he needed to be, he almost certainly wouldn't have been. He wasn't particularly good in the first two games against Carolina, and it was after that second game that we got his bizarre postgame comments that should've been a tip-off that something wasn't right.
The reality is that goaltending was going to be an issue for the Bruins from the moment Rask opted out, or even before that if he already had one foot out the door, no matter how much we wanted to believe otherwise.
Rask's critics like to pick out Game 6 of the 2013 Stanley Cup Final and Game 7 of last year's Cup Final and use them as evidence that you can't win a Cup with him. But they often conveniently leave out that the whole team collapsed in the last couple minutes of the Blackhawks' Cup-clinching win in 2013, and that the whole team played like hot garbage in that decisive game against the Blues last year.
There is arguably no goalie in the world who was going to win either of those games, and in both cases the Bruins probably don't even get as far as they did without Rask.
Maybe there's no goalie in the world who could have the Bruins in a better position in this series against Tampa either. It's not Halak's fault the Bruins haven't scored a single 5-on-5 goal in the last two games. It's not his fault they keep taking dumb penalties either. Nor is it his fault that his teammates allowed Ondrej Palat to get wide open right in the middle of five defenders on Saturday.
But Halak has certainly been part of the problem. Good goaltending can help mask other problems; subpar goaltending ensures they get exposed. To go deep in the playoffs, you need your goalie to make the saves he's supposed to make and a few he isn't. Halak has given up too many back-breaking goals on shots he should've saved, and hasn't made enough great saves to bail his team out when they've needed it.
Add in the way Andrei Vasilevskiy has been playing for the Lightning (.927 in the series and .963 in the last two games), and it becomes an area where Tampa easily gets the checkmark in its favor. It's a position the Bruins, who have been a bit spoiled with Rask and Tim Thomas, haven't been in often over the last decade-plus -- on the losing side of the goaltending matchup in a playoff series.
The future at the position seems just as uncertain as the present. Rask and Halak each have one more year left on their contracts, but you can't rule out the possibility of Rask retiring or the Bruins deciding it's time to move on and trying to trade him.
Even if the Bruins stick with the Rask-Halak platoon for next season, Rask is 33 and Halak is 35, so you'll still be moving on from both of them at some point in the not-too-distant future regardless.
Ideally, the future is in-house and at least one or two of Dan Vladar, Jeremy Swayman or Kyle Keyser will be ready to take the reins in the next couple years and you don't have to think about making some sort of big investment in free agency, which often turns out to be a fool's errand (just ask the Florida Panthers).
If Rask is back next season, though, just remember that he's not as replaceable as many around here would have you believe, and that finding a No. 1 goalie who can take you deep into the playoffs isn't so easy.
