Sam Donnellon | Biron is this year's Flyers' goalie of the future
WELL, THANK heavens, that has been taken care of. Seems as if we've gone on forever with uncertainty in the goaltending position.
WELL, THANK heavens, that has been taken care of.
Seems as if we've gone on forever with uncertainty in the goaltending position.
I mean, how long has it been since we were all set that way, for years to come - when the Flyers were not one, but two No. 1 goaltenders deep?
Um . . . well, that was last year.
Really?
Really.
Yep, it was only last year at this time that the Flyers had not one but two Olympic goalies on their roster. One, Antero Niittymaki was even the Most Valuable Player in that Torino tournament.
The other, Robert Esche, had backstopped the team to within a game of the Stanley Cup finals in 2004, joining that other Flyers goalie of the future, Brian Boucher, in accomplishing that near-feat in this decade.
Boucher was only 23 when Martin Brodeur and the Devils won a seventh-game staredown, 2-1, in the 2000 Eastern Conference finals. Like Esche, Boucher was brilliant throughout that run, and, after a brief holdout, was signed the following season to a long-term deal.
He was traded to Phoenix in 2002.
For Esche.
The goalie of the future for the goalie of the future.
Again.
Esche is still here, but he's the third man in, so to speak, and conventional wisdom is that he will be out of here in a few short weeks unless Niitty gets homesick and returns to play in
Finland. Either way, he becomes another entry on the long list of future goalies with incredibly short shelf lives, like leaving a Molson out of the refrigerator too long.
Only having a "C" sewn on your Flyers jersey is a more
certain harbinger of imminent calamity.
But that's another column for another day.
This day is about Martin Biron, the latest Flyers goalie of the future, who after signing a 2-year contract extension worth $7 million Tuesday, stopped 23 shots, including a penalty shot, in the Flyers' 5-1 victory over the struggling defending Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes last night at the Wachovia Center.
Biron's play was sharp, confident - core-group kind of stuff, to steal liberally from their old coach, Ken Hitchcock.
Skating out to meet Justin Williams on a second-period penalty shot, Biron effectively dictated what shot would be taken, then flicked the glove-side attempt over the crossbar. The lone goal came on a shot from the point that traveled through a committee of players, a shot that Biron waved at as if blindfolded.
"A mass of chaos," he described it.
Despite an upper body that can generally be described as wiry, Biron showed no qualms mixing it up with Hurricanes in the crease. Watching him celebrate goals on the other end, the long-ago comparison with that other Marty came into focus. In his short time here, Biron has come to either exemplify the Flyers' new-found feistiness, or has adopted it.
"I'm passionate when I get on the ice," he said. "I play with emotion, yes. I'm not the kind of guy who stands up in the room and yells and screams, but I will talk to guys."
A team leader then? A character guy?
"I didn't know much about him before he got here," coach John Stevens said. "The only thing I had to go on was the way he handled himself as a backup. And when he went back into the net after an injury to the starter last year, all he did was play great. And then you never heard from him again when the starter went back into the net.
"I think that speaks about his character. He's all about the team. That's what we heard as he came in here, and that's been the case."
Now 29, Biron has already done his time as the Sabres'
goalie of the future, back when Boucher was standing on his head here and current Sabres goalie Ryan Miller was getting his feet wet as a collegian in East Lansing.
So Biron might be the only one in town who sees his new deal not as the latest prayer of a goalie-hexed organization, but rather simply as a move by a team "positioning themselves for the future as one of the teams that can make a big bounce from this year to next year."
"A lot of words are used sometimes that really don't mean anything," he said. "They talk about stability. I look at it as you're moving toward the right direction . . . But you need to fill in
every position and get help in
every position. It's not one guy who comes in. Other than three or four guys in the league, there's not many teams who use the same goalie for 70 games. They share the role and they work off each other. That's how successful teams are built." *
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