Paul Holmgren speaks to Craig Custance of Sporting News Today. Here are the highlights. A hat tip to Kukla.
On the goalie controversy:
I think we have a good goaltending tandem. Marty Biron, if you look at the goalies around the league, is he upper-echelon? Probably not. There are very few guys in the upper echelon. (Antero Niittymaki) proved to be a good goalie as well. Last year (Biron) had a good year heading into the playoffs and he’d never played a playoff game. I thought he responded very well. … I think there are a lot of similarities this year to last year, and when the time comes, he’s our goalie. I don’t think Marty is a goalie who is going to play 79 games. He doesn’t have to. We have another guy who can play games and play well.
On the trade deadline:
There are some areas I wouldn’t mind shoring up. We’d like to get a little bigger up front, if we could. Some of the teams now in our conference, the Devils are a big team, Washington is a big team, the Bruins are a big team. We’re okay, but we have a little bit of a size differential up front.
The entire article is linked here, but be prepared — the formatting is a weird newspaper style. They make a big deal about a misleading quote from Holmgren that states the Flyers “need to get better to make the playoffs” but in my eyes the focus of the article is the statement on Biron. He’s not an upper echelon goalie, but he’s sufficent, is basically what Holmgren is saying.
I think it’s clear that the goalies we have now are going to be here until the summer at least, so the question then becomes “is Holmgren happy with a guy that isn’t upper echelon“?
