4-LOMov
One of the two most likely candidates is 4-LOMov, a rather cruel nickname I – and probably some others – came up with a couple years back. While the moniker might resonate with Star Wars fans, it was mostly born of frustration during one of the stretches where Varlamov gave up 4 goals against probably less often than it felt.
44 of 282 starts with the Colorado Avalanche meet the criteria of an F. It’s a little bit unsettling that he has only 7 fewer games below 850 than he does between 900-929. He also has 60 starts that qualify as Ds, his second most common result.
This means that 104 of his 282 games have ended with a SV% under 900. That’s almost 2 out of every 5 games. He’s been in the pretty bad to downright awful range more than twice as often as he’s been in the slightly below to slightly above average range.
That’s bad news for a young team that’s likely to make a lot of mistakes. There’s much more variation season to season in his D and F games than in B and C, making any sort of projection troublesome. His average is about 37%, with a high of 55% and a low of 18%
Going off Sakic’s 50 games target, Varlamov’s career average suggests that he’ll be below 900 roughly 18 times this season, though with a wide margin of error.
That is ugly.
But there’s always another side to the coin.