Ex-Edmonton Oilers goalie Stuart Skinner putting up mixed results with Penguins
Has ex-Edmonton Oilers goalie Stuart Skinner finally solved his problems with the Pittsburgh Penguins? It doesn’t seem like it.
Things haven’t gone exactly to plan for the Oilers since trading Skinner for Tristan Jarry back in December. The hope was that Jarry would step into Edmonton’s starter’s role and stabilize the goaltending, but he has now been relegated to an expensive backup behind Connor Ingram.
That has led many to criticize the trade, saying that Skinner would have been a better option than Jarry is right now. But how is the Edmonton native performing with the Penguins? Well, he’s been objectively better than Jarry.
That isn’t to say that Skinner has been out of this world since being traded away from the Oilers. In fact, he’s been his usual old self, posting a 9-5-4 record and .892 save percentage in 18 games.
His record in Edmonton before the trade was 11-8-4 with a .891 SV%. He’s basically been the exact same player, all the way up to his inconsistent streaks.
Skinner started off slow with the Penguins, losing his first three starts, and then caught fire with a stellar 8-1-0 stretch in January, where he carried a .917 SV%. Since then, however, he’s put up a 1-1-4 record and .885 SV%.
The hot and cold streaks are still very dramatic with Skinner’s game as Oilers fans remember from his tenure in Edmonton. Though that isn’t to say that the trade isn’t aging poorly from an Edmonton perspective.
Even with all of Skinner’s faults, he is still putting up a much better performance than Jarry, who is currently sitting with a 7-6-1 record and a dismal .855 SV% with the Oilers. According to MoneyPuck, Skinner is also producing a positive goals-saved above expected (GSAx) at +8.7, which is much higher than both Jarry (-3.7) and Ingram (+0.5).
It begs the question of what the team would have looked like if they had opted to keep Skinner for the remainder of the season and swapped out Calvin Pickard with Ingram instead.
It was becoming clear that Skinner was not going to be the answer to the Oilers’ goaltending woes, but it looks like Jarry is even further away from being that solution as well.