As a person, it's really hard to dislike Carolina goaltender Justin Peters. Ever since he has been a part of the Hurricanes organization, Peters has worked hard at every level and has never complained about things like playing time or not getting enough opportunities in the NHL. There have been a few instances where Peters was passed over for the Canes back-up job when he had a solid chance of earning it, but instead of sulking Peters continued to work on his game in the AHL and seemed to improve there every season. This was especially true for this year.

After posting a .931 save percentage in seven NHL games last year, Peters signed a two-year contract with the Hurricanes and it looked like he was going to battle Brian Boucher for the Hurricanes back-up spot. Had it just been Boucher he was competing with, Peters would have had a great shot of being in the NHL to start the year, and then Dan Ellis came along. Peters and Ellis spent the NHL lockout sharing the starting job for Carolina's AHL affiliate in Charlotte and both were invited to training camp once the NHL resumed. Boucher ended up being traded and Ellis beat out Peters for the starting job. Some players would be discouraged by this, but Peters seemed to be more motivated in the AHL, posting a .921 save percentage and earning a spot on the AHL's All-Star team.

While it was nice to Peters showing progress at the lower levels, there has been a reason why he had played only 28 NHL games despite being with the Hurricanes organization for eight years. Part of that is because goalies in general take a long time to develop, but another reason is because Peters just hasn't been that good in the NHL. Prior to last season, Peters' performance with the Hurricanes was less than impressive and he was only able to give the Canes replacement level goaltending, at the very most. Even when you factor in his .931 save percentage last season, Peters was unproven as an NHL goaltender and this is still true after this year.

The original plan for Peters was to keep him in Charlotte for this year until the one-way part of his contract kicked in and then he would hopefully take over as the back-up next season. An injury to Cam Ward put a cog into this plan and he found himself splitting the starting duty with Ellis for the second half of the season. Initially, this wasn't such a bad thing because Peters is 26 and has been in the AHL for six years now. If there was a time for him to make the jump to the NHL, this was it and he wasn't able to do that. 

Many fans and writers pointed to goaltending and Ward's injury as to what crippled the Hurricanes this season and the play of Peters was one of the reasons why this ended up being an issue. With how Ward was playing this year and the Hurricanes being a stronger even strength club than in year's past, all Peters and Ellis had to do was give the Canes above-average goaltending for them to stay in the hunt. Ellis managed to do this for most of his starts while Peters, unfortunately, did not.

I think Peters' strong work ethic will land him an NHL job somewhere down the line but with him being on a one-way deal next year and the Canes needing a back-up goalie now, it's tough to see him in Carolina's future plans. After the jump, we'll look at why this is so and what went wrong for Peters in this past season.

The Hurricanes got kind of lucky with Dan Ellis falling into their laps at the beginning of the year. They were planning on entering the season with Justin Peters as their back-up, but the NHL lockout caused a few players to find work in other leagues and it led to Ellis signing a professional tryout contract with the Charlotte Checkers, Carolina's AHL affiliate. Ellis put up some very impressive numbers in Charlotte while splitting the starting job with Justin Peters there and he eventually won Carolina's back-up job in training camp once the NHL season resumed.

Goaltending was somewhat of a hot button issue for the Hurricanes this year. After Cam Ward got off to a rocky start, the team was able to turn to Ellis to provide a few solid appearances in relief of him. Ellis allowed only seven goals on 122 shots in his first six games with the Canes and around that time, he was praised as the back-up that this team has needed for years. Some fans were even calling for Ellis to get more starts while Ward went through his struggles. After Ward suffered what turned out to be a season-ending injury, Charlotte's initial starting tandem of Ellis & Peters became Carolina's goaltending options and the results were not great.

Ellis finished the year with a save percentage of .906 and a record of 6-8-2, with seven of those losses coming after Ward's injury. Keeping Ellis around for another year appeared to be a slam dunk decision after how well he played as a back-up, but his numbers down the stretch is having some fans second guess whether or not the Hurricanes should re-sign him. Now a lot of people are questioning whether or not Ellis can handle a 20-25 game workload in a full-season and that he is an unreliable option should Ward suffer another injury. 

Seeing how Ellis had a save percentage of .897 after taking over for Ward and had three games where he failed to stop 85% of the shots he faced, it's easy to see why there is some concern about Ellis heading into next year. However, before anyone jumps to the conclusion that Ellis is "washed up," let's remember that he suffered a pretty ugly injury at the end of the Hurricanes/Devils game on March 22, where he cut his leg open with one of his own skate blades while making a desperation save. Prior to that injury, Ellis had a save percentage of .918 over 12 games which is very solid for a back-up. After the injury, his save percentage was .898 over seven games and he had three "blow-ups" in that stretch. It might be easy to point to Ellis' late-season struggle as evidence that he can't handle a starter's workload, but it seems more likely that the injury affected his play late in the year and he might have been rushed back from it.

No matter what the case is, the Hurricanes need to make a decision regarding their back-up goaltender and bringing back Ellis for another year is one of their options. It certainly looks to be a safer option than giving the back-up job to Peters or finding another goaltender through free agency. With the goalie market being the way it is and the Canes having limited cap space, it's not going to be an easy decision for the Canes. Looking back at the season Ellis had with the Canes, he made a decent case to be the back-up here for at least another season.

Ask anyone what the "turning point" of the season was for Carolina and I would bet money that at least seven out of ten people will say that their playoff hopes were doomed once goaltender Cam Ward got hurt. The Canes went 7-17-3 with him out of the lineup and were on the losing end of a lot of blowouts down the stretch, so it's easy to jump to this conclusion. While I don't doubt that having Ward in the lineup would have helped stopped the bleeding a little, his injury wasn't the sole reason the Hurricanes season went down the toilet in the second half. 

Those who have been saying that "the losing streak would have never happened without Ward" are ignoring a few things. First of all, Dan Ellis gave the Canes very solid goaltending before he suffered an injury and rushed himself back from it. Secondly, the Hurricanes could not buy a goal to save their lives during the latter half of the season. They scored more than three goals in only one of their final 20 games and were held to two or fewer goals in nine of those games. Finally, and most importantly, Ward himself was not spectacular when he was healthy. 

Ward is a very good goalie and having him instead of Peters down the stretch may have earned the Hurricanes a couple wins, but saying that his injury alone is what ruined Carolina's season is lazy and not looking at all of the details. As a team, the Hurricanes were bad in their last 20 games and unless Ward could channel his inner Tuukka Rask, it's likely that they would have finished outside of the playoffs even if he was healthy. Many have said that Ward would have given the team more confidence or "momentum" by making a few big saves but the facts are that the Canes were a terrible team at preventing shots on goal last year and had trouble scoring in addition to that. Unless you have an elite netminder, you aren't going to make the post-season with that combination and Ward's performance was not elite this year.

Now that we have that cleared up, let's take a closer look at the year that was for Carolina's franchise goaltender and compare his performance to Carolina's other goaltenders.

Goaltenders are a tricky bunch to figure out. Fans will either love or hate them depending on how they perform in a ten game stretch. If they stand on their head for and steal a couple of games for their teams, the goalie will be heralded and be a front-runner for Team MVP. Whereas if they have an awful or sub-par stretch for ten games, fans will want their netminder on the first bus out of town and their back-up to get the majority of the starts. We've seen this in plenty of cities over the years (Vancouver and Philadelphia specifically come to mind) and are beginning to see glimpses of it in Carolina with incumbent starter Cam Ward.

Ward is normally beloved in Carolina for playing a critical role in the Hurricanes winning their only Stanley Cup in 2005-06, but his play as of late has left many Canes fans frustrated. He is currently sporting a save percentage of .896 and has given the Hurricanes only four games that fit under Hockey Prospectus' "quality start" guidelines. Goaltending can play such a critical role in winning and losing and what the Hurricanes have gotten from Ward so far isn't good enough to win games. His most recent outing against the Winnipeg Jets was especially bad, as Ward let in three very soft goals which ended up being the deciding factor in a game that the Hurricanes played well enough to earn at least a point.

As frustrating as Ward's start to the year is, I don't think there is much to worry about with him. Some may think that his is a sign of his career being on the downturn but let's not forget that he went through a worse bump in the road in the first half of last season.

The growth of statistical analysis in hockey has come a long way in the last few years as there are now many different ways to analyze players and break down the ins and outs of just about anyone who has played in the NHL recently. However, most of the work that has been done in the last few years has applied to skaters while goalie analysis is still gaining its footing. Just looking a goalie's save percentage usually gets the job done because it's a simple way to tell you how efficient a goalie is at preventing pucks from going in his net. However, another thing we know is that the performance of goaltenders tends to bounce around over the course of a few years and in many cases, over the course of a full season. We saw it this year with Cam Ward and the Coyotes, Blues, Flyers, Kings, Penguins and Lightning also got a taste of how a good or bad season from a goalie can come out of nowhere.

Predicting goaltending performance is tough and it's probably impossible because of how much the team around him can have an impact on his performance. However, what we can do is further the statistical analysis of goaltenders to see what went right and what went wrong for them during a regular season. A goalie with a low save percentage on a team that doesn't give up many shots usually means that the net-minder isn't getting the job done while the team around him is playing fine. On the flip-side, a goalie who has to face a ton of shots and puts up a respectable save percentage despite that deserves more praise than a goalie with similar numbers on a team with a better defense.That's a fair assumption but it would be nice to get a closer look at his performance to see what exactly he is doing wrong and what kind of saves he is forced to make. Does he have positioning issues? Does he get beaten five-hole a lot? Is he the type of goalie who is more likely to challenge shooters or does his defense just make every save incredibly difficult on him?

Now, looking into this might be a tad excessive because it's possible that goalie could inexplicably bottom-out after having a great season and not many holes to speak of, but getting a closer look at a goalie's strong and weak points could be helpful for predicting future performance. Showing where a goalie gets beaten the most can also give fans a better idea of what his tendencies are and so would looking at what types of mistakes he routinely makes. There's a lot more to goalies than just their save percentage and how many shots they face, so doing some further analysis on their performance wouldn't hurt.

How do we do an analysis like this? I made an attempt at giving an in-depth look at Cam Ward last year where I looked at what types of goals the gave up, where most of the shots he faced came from and where he was beaten. I'm going to do the same thing with this analysis but I changed up my methods a little bit. Before, I was going by my own judgement to determine what is a "good" or "bad" goal and for this analysis, I referred to the "soft goal" guidelines drawn up by Rob Parker from Japers Rink. A "soft goal" is one that a goalie has to have and by Parker's guidelines, a shot from outside the scoring chance area where the goalie HAS to make the save. For instance, a shot from a bad angle that squeaks through the goalie short side is a soft goal but a shot from the point that is deflected in or goes through a screen is not. I was a tad less lenient on that front since there are plenty stoppable shots that come from the scoring chance area but my criteria was mostly the same otherwise. Goals that come on shots that most goalies usually stop are considered to have more of an impact, so this is definitely worth looking at.

In addition to that, I did this analysis for all four Carolina goalies who played this year instead of just Ward. The three other goalies didn't play enough for their data to be considered anything significant but I decided to look at them anyway. The data here on Ward will probably be the most intriguing since we now have two seasons worth of data on him and can start to form some more solid conclusions about him. It will also be interesting to see how his play has or has not improved compared to last season. I noted in my analysis last season that Ward was beaten on his glove side a lot. Is that still true this year? Find out after the jump.

Ever since Cam Ward became the incumbent starter for the Hurricanes, the team has had a lot of trouble finding a reliable back-up for him. For the most part, they have been using guys called up from the AHL (see Leighton, Michael; Peters, Justin) or career journeymen like Manny Legace and John Grahame to spell Cam Ward and none of them have been that good in a back-up role. Because of this, Ward has started at least 80% of the Hurricanes games when healthy and it has definitely led to him being fatigued as the season goes on.

There were a lot of people who thought that Ward would get a few extra nights off this season because the team signed veteran Brian Boucher to back him up. In fact, this signing was praised by quite a few people including Jonathan Willis of Hockey Prospectus who had this to say about it.

In 2010-11, the Hruricanes used Justin Peters in the [back-up] role and he was a train wreck, costin gthe Hurricanes 11 more goals than a league-average goalie would have. This contrasts with his replacement, Brian Boucher, who stopped five more goals than an average goaltender would have for the Flyers in 2010-11. While Boucher's ability to have a positive impact will be limited because a) he will play in fewer games this season and b) his career track record suggests that he is a pretty average goalie, he should be able to stem the bleeding that happened every time Peters skated off the bench. If the former Flyers backup netminder can provide an average or even just below-average performance for the Hurricanes, they'll make up all the ground that they'll lose if Ward's save percentage dips next season. The addition of Boucher alone means tht things are much better than they were one year ago.

At the time this piece was written (summer of 2011), it seemed like a fair assessment but things didn't turn out the way most predicted at all. Brian Boucher was injured for most of the season and played in only 10 games. However, when he was healthy, he performed at below replacement level and Ward was ridden like a pack-mule for most of the season. If that wasn't enough, the goalie who Boucher was supposed to replace, Justin Peters, played six games with the Hurricanes and was terrific in all of them, stopping .945 of the even strength shots he faced so the Boucher signing might look like a bust to some.

One thing that a lot of people fail to realize is that goaltender performance is hard to predict and  Carolina has struggled with this since the lockout. What we saw from Boucher and Peters in a combined 17 games probably isn't anywhere near their true talent level. Thus, it is unfair to judge the Boucher signing now and it also too early to say that Peters should be the back-up next season. After the jump, we will take a look at how Ward's back-ups have performed over the years and how Boucher might perform next season.

Cam Ward is a tough goalie to figure out. He is paid as if he is one of the league's elite goaltenders, but his career numbers show that he isn't. He is an above average goalie who is very streaky and I'm sure most of us know that. Goaltender performance is hard to predict but what makes Ward such a strange goalie is that he can go from playing like John Grahame to Tomas Vokoun in the span of a season, and we've seen that first hand this year. We all know that Ward is streaky and that he's played great for the last two months but what you may have not known is that this current hot streak is on is one of the best of his career.

Find out more after the jump

The month of December has been quite a ride for Cam Ward. He's been pulled in two games, has given up three or more goals in all but three games and has a save percentage of .882. On the flip-side, he also played two of his best games of the season against Toronto and Vancouver and has shown signs of looking like his older self. And people wonder why I never try to predict goalie performance....

It's especially difficult to predict how a goalie Ward's age will perform because he is in his late 20's, which is the "prime" age for most hockey players but he also debuted at a young age so that's worth keeping in mind. To make things even more difficult, Ward is coming off his best season as an NHL-er so his performance can really go in either direction at this point. Unfortunately for the Hurricanes, his performance has declined a ton compared to last season and while it's not completely his fault, I'm sure no one saw him having a sub .900 save percentage this late into the season. Some people say that he's still feeling all of the mileage that he took on last year and that's a valid argument. He did play more minutes than any other goalie last season (4318 mins.) and saw 30+ shots in 48 out of the 74 games he played and has been under the same amount of pressure this season (has seen 30+ shots in 17 out of 32 games), so maybe this is just his workload catching up to him?

Over at Broad Street Hockey, they looked at Ilya Bryzgalov's save percentage in line-graph form going by 10-game averages. Bryz has been awful this year and looking at how he has performed over his career and seeing his highs and lows is a good way to determine if his poor play was just a rough patch or him steadily declining. They determined that Bryz is playing the worst hockey of his career but history suggests that he should rebound. When reading that article I thought to myself "Hey, you know another great goalie who is playing bad right now? Cam Ward." so I decided to do this experiment for myself. Every goalie can be expected to go through peaks and valleys so is Ward's current play just one of those? We'll find out after the jump.

Every hockey pundit talks about how teams need to have consistency at the goaltender position in order to be successful but what exactly does that mean? You could be like the New Jersey Devils, New York Rangers or Buffalo Sabres who have had one main guy and a few back-ups since the lock-out and have received solid goaltending with that. Teams like the Detroit Red Wings, Nashville Predators and Boston Bruins who have used over 10 goalies since the lock-out and have gotten average to great goaltending out of all of them. It's true that there are teams who cycle goalies really well but the team's who get the best goaltending are those who do not have to go through a lot of them over the years.

When I wrote my review of Cam Ward's season about a month ago, I said this:

"I wouldn't put Ward in an elite class like his contract indicates but I do think he will provide the Canes with stable and reliable goaltending for the remainder of his contract."

Why would I not consider a goalie like Ward "elite?" He played in 74 games last season and posted a .927 save percentage. He played a huge role in the Canes Stanley Cup victory in his rookie season. He's started 75% of Carolina's games for the past four seasons. What makes him not one of the absolute best goalies in the league right now? Here's why: The difference between the 6th and 18th best goalie in the league is often very little (something like .005 %) and the word "elite" should only be given to those who really excel above the league average (last year it was .920, since the lockout it's .918) and do it on a consistent basis. A couple months ago, I created a few definitions of what makes an elite goaltender, but I discovered some problems with this, mostly with how goalies who were top-level years ago ended up being close to "elite" through this definition (think Giguere and Kiprusoff). With how much a goalie's performance can change over a short period of time, I'm not sure looking at stats since the lockout is the best way to define elite goalies, but there areother things we can do and they will help show where Ward stands among other top-level goalies in the league and if he belongs in an elite class.

Ward may have helped the Canes win the Cup his rookie season, but he was not that good of a goalie his first three seasons. In fact, he had a sub-.900 save percentage at even strength his first two and was below-average in this third. This is why we can't call him an elite goalie since the lockout. However, in his last three seasons, it's been a much more positive story for Ward as he's had even strength save percentages of .926, .924 and .927, respectively and an overall save percentage of .926. The league average save percentage for goalies at even strength during this time is .920 and Ward's overall ES save percentage from 2009-11 puts him very high in the rankings. Goalies who have posted similar save percentages during this period are Carey Price, Ryan Miller, Kari Lehtonen and Ilya Bryzgalov. That's pretty good company to be in, as far as I'm concerned. Goalies who had higher save percentages than him were Pekka Rinne, Tim Thomas, Jonas Hiller and Roberto Luongo. Three of which were the Veznia finalists in this most recent season and the other one would have been if it weren't for injuries. By this, it does not seem too out of the question to put Ward in an elite class but this seems like we're just cherry-picking because we're only judging Ward by the last three years, which conveniently happen to be his three best seasons.

"Elite" is a tough definition to figure out for goalies because everyone has their own viewpoints on it. Would you consider Ward a top-level goalie because he's had three very good seasons? Would you be comfortable putting him in the same class as Roberto Luongo or even Henrik Lundqvist? I am not 100% sure if I would but it's the same case I have with not calling Pekka Rinne an "elite" goalie because he's only played in three full seasons. Is he a top goalie in the game right now? Absolutely. Elite? If he can keep putting up these kind of numbers for another season or two, then yes.

There's a lot of things about Ward that make me confident, though. First of all he's only 27 and in the prime of his career right now so it should not be a surprise to anyone that he has been improving with every season. Ward was one of the main reasons that this team was able to be in the position that they were last year and it's possible that he could be what keeps the Hurricanes in almost every game they play even if the team is struggling. When looking at the best single season goalie performances, a lot of these goalies had the best seasons when they were in their late 20's/early 30's so Ward's best seasons could be very soon. I don't know if I would consider Ward an elite goalie like Thomas or Luongo now but if his trend of improving with every season continues, then maybe I will be in that mindset.  Either way, Ward is on track to give the Canes great and stable goaltending for at least the rest of his contract even if he isn't elite.