The Net: Avalanche goalie breakdown day four

The Colorado Avalanche finished up training camp today and with comes the conclusion of our daily looks at the battle for the top goaltender job. Instead of wasting time beating around the bush, let’s just get to who did what on the last official day of camp.

Semyon Varlamov

The Russian standout was solid again today, showing off one of his greatest strengths as he shut down the majority of the chances that came his way today. It was a special teams day so everything fired at him came with a man down and he was really only beat by Tyson Jost banging home rebounds or blistering a one-timer past him.

Varly was quick as usual, strong on his edges, and looked very comfortable reading the play. Where he really benefitted was going against lower caliber power play units and that definitely gets held against him (even though it wasn’t his fault). Going against Jost’s line is a tough assignment on paper but they were extremely out of sync, rarely generating quality chances. The other unit was predominantly AHL players or guys on the NHL roster bubble.

As you might expect, what Varlamov saw today was nerfed significantly compared to what he’ll see in the regular season and for sure compared to the monster his counterpart had to deal with. Again, it isn’t Varlamov’s fault he saw weaker competition but he also didn’t thrive the way I would have wanted given that lack of quality of competition. He was just fine but nothing special. It certainly wasn’t like his day from camp two days ago.

Philipp Grubauer

Finally, the underdog gets a day to go in his favor. Going against the Nathan MacKinnon-led top PP unit, Grubauer’s work was cut out for him throughout his entire session. He responded wonderfully by showing off an impressive ability to read and react to the power play. Since entering the NHL, Grubauer has been one of the best goalies while short-handed and given the day he had, it isn’t hard to see why.

His reading of the play and puck tracking was exceptional and he was consistently found himself in the right position to not only make the initial save but also shut down any rebound attempts. He was a black hole where pucks went to die as MacKinnon’s and J.T. Compher’s units struggled mightily to get any pucks past him during the drills. The only real success they had was when they first started warming up and Grubauer went from doing extremely slow-paced goaltender drills to stopping pucks at full speed. To steal an analogy (stick taps!), it’s like going from the slow-pitch softball batting cage to facing major league-caliber pitching.

Once Grubauer settled in, though, he made life miserable for the shooters trying to get any confidence going.

Today’s Winner: Grubauer

With a special shout out to Pavel Francouz, who also had a really good day and an otherwise rock solid training camp, Grubauer stole the show today as he stifled the MacKinnon line. That’s pretty hard to do so he gets the win today. While I have Varlamov still taking the battle during training camp, Grubauer did not disappoint and showed why the Avalanche were high enough on him to commit to three years of him.

Final Standings: Varlamov 2-1-1