Editor’s note: Heading into the new NHL season, Flyers beat writer Charlie O’Connor wrote in-depth stories on each of the team’s key contributors, looking back at their 2019-20 performance and ahead to the questions that will define their 2020-21 campaigns.
As far back as the summer of 2016, a question began to be spoken aloud in Philadelphia Flyers fan circles, first as a whisper, a throwaway musing on a message board or a casual comment on an article, and slowly swelling into perhaps the most important factor in determining the franchise’s success over the next 10 years.
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Is it safe to believe in Carter Hart?
It’s difficult to blame the locals for their natural reticence about up-and-coming Flyers goaltenders. False saviors have regularly emerged, from highly drafted prospects to big-name free-agent additions to surprise breakouts. But for the better part of 30 years, every time a new candidate in net appeared, he eventually wilted and failed to become the long-term solution that fans so desperately wanted.
So when the Flyers made Hart the first goalie selected in the 2016 draft, the response was, “He’s just a second-round pick, far from a sure thing.” A stellar Draft+1 season? “It’s only junior hockey, and his WHL team is so strong defensively that it inflates his stats.” A dominant showing for Team Canada at the 2017 World Junior Championship? “Impressive, but it’s still not the pros.” A promising NHL rookie season? “Gotta prove it’s not a fluke.”
Some of these responses expressed reasonable concerns; all possessed at least a degree of truth. But they also felt like fans preparing themselves for the worst, expecting that at some point, obviously, the floor would fall out from under Hart and reveal him to be the fraud that so many other hyped Flyers goalies over the past three decades proved to be.
At 22, Hart’s career trajectory is unclear. But after following up his impressive freshman campaign with an even stronger sophomore season and a playoff performance bordering on star-making? The time is rapidly approaching when even the most pessimistic Flyers fans have to acknowledge the reality: Not only is it safe to believe in Hart as the long-awaited answer in goal for Philadelphia, but it’s also the only rational course of action.
Don’t underrate Hart’s 2019-20 season
It wouldn’t be difficult to take a quick look at Hart’s basic stats in 2019-20 and come away thinking he had merely a fine age-21 campaign. Yes, Hart established himself as the unquestioned starter for one of the better teams in the Eastern Conference. But his .914 save percentage and 2.42 goals against average weren’t especially glossy — in fact, Hart actually posted a better save percentage (.917) in his rookie season. There’s a surface-level case that Hart stagnated rather than took a significant step forward.
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Don’t be fooled.
The increased workload shouldn’t be ignored. (Hart started 40 of the Flyers’ 69 games in 2019-20 compared with 30 of 82 the season before.) Nor should the fact that .914 was still far better than the league average of .905, or that Hart was much more consistent this time around, earning a “quality start” — a higher-than-league-average single-game save percentage, or a save percentage higher than 88.5 percent when facing 20 or fewer shots — in 62.5 percent of his starts, compared with 46.7 percent in Year 1.
But the biggest point in Hart’s favor is his dramatic improvement by public advanced metrics. In his first season, Hart’s .917 save percentage was less impressive when the shots he faced were adjusted for location and quality. In fact, Evolving-Hockey’s expected goal model tracked him as stopping 2.7 fewer goals as a rookie than “expected.” In 2019-20 that flipped. Hart may have stopped fewer shots from a raw percentage standpoint, but according to Evolving-Hockey, he prevented 7.25 extra goals than a league-average goaltender.
And +7.25 goals saved above expectation (GSAx) is far from merely fine. In fact, Hart ranked seventh among all goalies in 2019-20, and fourth when looking only at starting netminders. By GSAx, Hart trailed just Vezina winner Connor Hellebuyck, Corey Crawford and Tuukka Rask — pretty solid company.
Hart’s season wasn’t perfect. An early rough patch in mid-October had fans on high alert, as he was pulled from two of three starts and his save percentage dropped to a ghastly .862. But Flyers players never lost faith in him, and Hart rebounded in November and December. A lower-right abdominal strain slowed Hart in January, and knocked him out for nearly a month. But when Hart returned, he was better than ever, closing out the regular season with a fantastic .934 save percentage in his final 11 games, leading the charge for the resurgent Flyers.
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And even as his teammates struggled to regain their end-of-season form in the Toronto playoff bubble, Hart had no such issues. In 14 postseason games, Hart stopped 92.6 percent of the shots sent his way and prevented 6.68 extra goals per GSAx. He was the biggest reason the Flyers beat the Montreal Canadiens in Round 1, winning a surprisingly stingy, even series largely because Hart outplayed Carey Price — one of Hart’s idols — who was operating at the top of his game.
To recap: Hart held up with an increased workload, was more consistent, put up significantly better advanced metrics and proved he had the mental fortitude not to be fazed by the increased intensity and pressure of the NHL playoffs. I’d call that an extremely successful season.
Just how special is Hart?
It’s not just Hart’s strong season that makes his work impressive. It’s that he did it at 21, since he didn’t turn 22 until the playoffs in August.
Goalies that young rarely establish themselves as bona fide NHL starters, especially over the past 20 years, as the league-wide consensus has become that netminder prospects take longer to develop than position players. Even fewer under-22 goalies actually deliver above-average results on the rare occasions their teams show that level of faith in them at such a young age.
Hockey Reference’s goals against %- (GA%-) isn’t a perfect metric — it doesn’t adjust for shot quality, specifically — but it’s a useful tool in accounting for era. After all, an .890 save percentage for a goalie in the high-scoring 1980s might be stellar, but the same result 10 years later at the height of the neutral-zone trap era would be grounds for immediate demotion. GA%- normalizes for that factor. A 100 means that during that season a goalie equaled league-average results; anything below 100 means he was better than average. And in both of Hart’s seasons, he was sub-100 — 92 in 2018-19 and 96 in 2019-20.
How rare is it for a goalie to be league average or better before he turns 22? Even more rare than you might think, according to Hockey Reference’s Season Finder tool.
Since 1955, only eight goalies before Hart delivered two seasons (20 games minimum) with a GA%- of 100 or lower before turning 22: Roberto Luongo, Jim Carey, Grant Fuhr, Mark Fitzpatrick, Don Beaupre, Pat Riggin, Tom Barrasso and Patrick Roy. That’s three Hall of Famers (Fuhr and Roy are already in; Luongo is a lock to gain entrance) and two more with 15-plus-year careers (Beaupre, Barrasso). Oh, and the group combined for six Vezina trophies and nine Stanley Cup rings. That’s pretty exclusive company.
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The best argument that Hart’s admission to this group isn’t that impressive an achievement is that teams simply wait too long to call up their top goalie prospects these days, and if they weren’t so conservative with promotions, the group would be far larger. Essentially, it’s fear and irrational risk-aversion that result in so few goalies getting the opportunity Hart did, and true-talent wise, he’s actually not so special — he was just lucky enough to get the early shot that many young netminders deserve but don’t receive.
That said, the bias against trusting young goalies makes the achievement even more impressive, in a way: Hart had to be so good that he forced an organization to completely buck goalie development conventional wisdom. Then, he had to excel in spite of the increased pressure that comes with being such a rarity. Others in Hart’s situation wilted in similar circumstances. Price, for example, collapsed during his first taste of playoff hockey and then delivered a disappointing, sub-league-average sophomore season. Hart, on the other hand, thrived.
Goalies with Hart’s track record at such a young age don’t come around very often.
Fake concerns and actual concerns
Hart is not a finished product. While coaches and goalie experts alike rave about his technical ability and work ethic, he isn’t perfect — otherwise, he’d be chasing down Vezina trophies already. However, it’s important to separate out viable concerns and criticisms surrounding Hart’s game, and “issues” that are most likely driven by random variance rather than anything Hart needs to fix.
Yes, this is a reference to Hart’s “bad on the road” quirk in 2019-20.
To be clear, it’s an objective fact that Hart did not produce strong results on the road last season. The difference in his home/road regular-season splits was staggering: a .943 save percentage at home and an .857 rate away from Philadelphia. Over a 43-game sample, Hart did perform a lot worse on the road.
The good news is that there’s no reason to think this issue was anything more than a fluke occurrence. For starters, it had never been a problem for Hart in his career. In his rookie season, he was significantly better on the road (.928 save percentage) than at home (.912). And while he was slightly better at home versus on the road in his junior career — .929 save percentage at home, .925 on the road — it was not an enormous gap, and both marks were stellar. That’s more an example of Hart performing well everywhere but a little better in familiar confines. Second, the NHL playoffs this past summer were essentially all “road games,” and Hart didn’t miss a beat. This shouldn’t be a concern moving forward.
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However, here’s a real concern: Hart is still a work-in-progress as a puck handler, as former Flyers goalie and NBC Sports analyst Brian Boucher pointed out in the summer. “At times, he’s still not sure what he wants to do,” Boucher said when describing Hart’s occasional lack of decisiveness out of his crease with the puck on his stick. A plus puck handler in net can provide serious value to a team — just think back to Price and how his ability to play the puck helped take the teeth out of the Flyers’ forecheck in the playoffs. But as Boucher also noted, strong puck handling is not crucial to a goalie’s success, either. Plenty of elite goalies — Henrik Lundqvist, for example — never quite figured it out, and still went on to have Hall of Fame-level careers.
Another potential area for growth is endurance, specifically in avoiding injuries (he’s missed extended time twice in his NHL career) and the ability to hold up on short rest. In the playoffs, Flyers head coach Alain Vigneault used Hart in one back-to-back — Game 5 against the Canadiens — and he delivered one of his only clunkers in the bubble. So when the same situation arose in the New York Islanders series, Vigneault chose to go with Brian Elliott, and the Flyers lost that game as well. Back-to-backs are demanding for any goalie — it’s fair to note that the Islanders went with their backup in that game, too — but true workhorses can hold up in both games. It doesn’t seem like Hart is quite there yet; he’s been given only two back-to-back starts in his NHL career.
He hasn’t been great on one day of rest, either. In his rookie season, Hart posted a .906 save percentage and a -5.8 GSAx on one day rest; he produced a much-better 0.924 and +3.1 GSAx in all other games that year. The trend held in 2019-20: 0.907 and +0.56 on one day rest, 0.916 and +6.69 when not.
It’s possible this could be a quirk in the numbers, just as the home/road splits likely are. But Hart has acknowledged the grind of the NHL schedule forced him to make adjustments early in his career to account for it.
“I think the biggest thing I took away when I was (a) first-year (player) was just taking care of your body and how short a time you have between games,” he said. “It could be a quick turnaround most nights. The biggest thing is you really have to take care of your body.”
One great sign: In the playoffs, Hart excelled on one day’s rest, posting a .928 save percentage and two shutouts in those games. If this was a real issue, it seems like Hart is in the process of addressing it.
Finally, it might be a cliché, but the importance of consistency can’t be understated. It takes only a few rough patches — such as the one Hart experienced in mid-October last season — to turn a .924 save percentage into a .914. If Hart wants to take the next step into elite territory, he needs to minimize the damage on his off nights, and maximize the value of the nights when he’s seeing the puck best. But he’s only 22. He has more than enough time to work on addressing that “issue” and any others that might exist.
Don’t be afraid to get excited about Hart
It’s easy to understand why Hart skeptics might still exist.
And to a degree, it’s fair. The goaltending position is notoriously difficult to project, even outside of the confines of the City of Brotherly Love. Bad seasons to otherwise great goalies happen out of nowhere; netminders who were poor for years deliver Vezina-caliber campaigns seemingly out of thin air, only to rapidly fall back into obscurity. Hart’s rare NHL track record doesn’t make him immune to collapse — for every Fuhr and Roy, there’s a Carey or Riggin who flamed out after early-career success to provide a check on unbridled Flyers fan optimism.
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But here’s the thing about Hart: There are essentially no red flags with this guy.
He tore apart junior hockey. He’s posted two consecutive above-average seasons at an age in which goalies are rarely in the NHL. His most recent public advanced metrics are even more impressive than his basic stats. He’s proven he doesn’t wilt in high-pressure situations such as the world juniors and the NHL playoffs. His coaches and teammates rave about his character, his preternatural calm. And he passes the eye test; it’s hard to argue he lacks plus athleticism when he’s pulling off saves like these. Isn’t this essentially the Platonic ideal of the early-career résumé of a future star goalie?
Yes, Hart has yet to have his first no-doubt-about-it elite season. But look at it this way. If for the rest of his 20s, Hart simply replicates what he’s done in his first two seasons — a .915 save percentage, 94 GA%- and good playoff results — he’ll be the best Flyers goaltender by the numbers in more than 30 years. He doesn’t even need to get any better to clear that bar.
And it’s not at all outlandish to think that he could get a lot better.
The industry consensus is that goaltenders peak later than skaters at other positions. It’s a piece of conventional wisdom that’s difficult to test because goalies tend to start their NHL careers late. But let’s assume for a second there’s truth to the belief. That would imply that Hart’s best years are still very much in front of him, as they were for every goalie in the NHL Network’s recent (flawed) Top 10 Goalies list. Is this a particularly scientific way to analyze the peaks of goalies? Of course not. But it does show that lots of the “best” netminders don’t deliver their true masterpieces until their mid-to-late 20s.
Could that signature season come in 2020-21? Well, goalie remains the toughest position to predict on a year-to-year basis, and the upcoming season will provide a unique set of challenges for Hart. The schedule will almost certainly be compressed. There will be yet-to-be-agreed-upon health restrictions because of the pandemic. The Flyers will enter the season expected to contend. Hart has a contract negotiation looming. In theory, we could be talking next summer about how any combination of these factors led to Hart’s first disappointing NHL season.
But Hart has passed every single test thrown his way so far. He’s improved each year of his career. And he’s given the hockey world no reason to doubt him.
Why start now?
All statistics courtesy of Hockey Reference, Evolving-Hockey and Natural Stat Trick.
(Top photo: Elsa / Getty Images)