Vezina Trophy: Scott Wedgewood, G, COL<\/p>\n
The Colorado goalie, who took on the starter\u2019s role after an offseason injury to Mackenzie Blackwood, leads the League in wins (11), and has only lost once in regulation as of the one-quarter mark. With Blackwood\u2019s return earlier this month, he and Wedgewood now form one of the League\u2019s best tandems. Per NHL EDGE stats, Wedgewood has the best midrange save percentage (.941; minimum 10 games) and is tied with four others for the most starts with greater than a .900 save percentage (10).<\/p>\n
NHL EDGE IQ uses \u201cProjected Goal Rate\u201d (PGR) to estimate the likelihood of a shot attempt becoming a goal. For context, anything at or above a PGR of 12.0 percent is considered a high-probability attempt, and the NHL average PGR this season is approximately 5.14 percent for inferenced shot attempts. Inferenced shot attempts exclude shots greater than 60 feet, those beyond the goal line and empty-net attempts.<\/p>\n
\u201cSaves Above Projected,\u201d another NHL EDGE IQ metric, is the total shots on goal minus the sum of the PGR on all of those inferenced attempts. A positive number means the goalie is making more saves than an average goalie would given the quality of the shot attempt that reaches goal. In terms of \u201cSaves Above Projected,\u201d Wedgewood (plus-9.43) ranks third in the NHL behind Logan Thompson (plus-12.82) of the Washington Capitals and Spencer Knight of the Chicago Blackhawks (plus-12.17).<\/p>\n
Connor Hellebuyck of the Winnipeg Jets has won the Vezina in consecutive seasons and remains the front-runner, with Thompson and other workhorse starters also in the conversation. But, with the Avalanche leading the NHL standings at 13-1-5 and Wedgewood having the offensive support of major awards contenders in Nathan MacKinnon (leads NHL with 33 points in 19 games) and Makar (leads defensemen with 25 points), the 33-year-old goalie is a dark horse Vezina candidate — even as their 1A option in net.<\/p>\n
Other surprise Vezina candidate: Spencer Knight, G, CHI<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vezina Trophy: Scott Wedgewood, G, COL The Colorado goalie, who took on the starter\u2019s role after an offseason…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":297560,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-297559","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297559\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/297560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}