2014-15 OTF Report Card: Carter Hutton

The Stats:

Season Summary:

There are few players on the Predators roster this year (other than a couple trade deadline acquisitions) that have drawn more ire than Carter Hutton. Hutton was given a two year contract at the beginning of 2014-15 and makes near the league minimum. He is asked to backup a goalie who throughout most of the year was a front runner for the Vezina and a dark horse candidate for the Hart.

He doesn’t have to be amazing, just serviceable. During the stretch of games where Pekka Rinne went down, Hutton played decent going 4-1-2. This proves, once again, that Hutton gets better the more starts he has consecutively. For a team that relies on Rinne to take the lion’s share of the starts, Hutton is not a good option for a backup. The games that Hutton played to give Rinne a break (the primary reason for having a backup netminder) he went 2-6-2. Not good.

Interesting fact: Hutton allowed three or more goals on ten different occasions while playing only 18 games.

Any mistake made by Hutton is so amplified compared to Rinne it borders unfair. Hutton has semi-average numbers for the year and excelled with more games under his belt, but how many times did we hold our collective breaths waiting for the “Pekka would have had that” goal to come.

Highlight Moment:

This…was…amazing

One of the few times that our beloved Predators ended up on ESPN SportsCenter…as the Number One Play of the Night (Carter earned that honor last season with the stop against Philadelphia). If it wasn’t for that damn game-saving interception in the Super Bowl, the Hutton save would have been the Best of the Best Play of the Year.

Enjoy…

The Road Ahead:

Hutton still has one more year under contract. The league needs backup goalies and Hutton sort of works in that aspect (but much better in the braodcast capacity). Hopefully, Poile can ship out Hutton with a package to land a nice trade piece before the draft. In this scenario, one of Mazanec, Saros or Hellberg can battle royale at development/training camp for the backup job behind Rinne.

Spirit Animal:

Last year, I stated that Carter Hutton’s spirit animal was a jackrabbit due to his insane quickness in that miraculous come-from-behind-the-net save. His spirit animal now is a worker bee. When he is working tirelessly over and over again, he is a productive member of society. When he’s just around every once in a while it’s annoying and threatening in a bad way.

Average OTF Grade: C-

**Glossary:

AdSv% – Adjusted Save Percentage

Sv%L – Save percentage on Low Danger shots

Sv%M – Save percentage on Medium Danger shots

Sv%H – Save percentage on High Danger shots

QS% – Quality Start Percent (~53% is league average)

RBS – Really Bad Starts (Starts with a Sv% below .850)

GSAA – Goals Saved Above Average (Goals goalie prevented given Sv% and shots faced vs. league average Sv% on same number of shots)

GPS – Goalie Point Share (Estimate of the amount of points a goalie’s play contributed to his team)

What grade would you give Carter Hutton for 2014-15?