Quote:
Originally Posted by Rasmuth
how about:
Dominak Hasek
Rasmus Ristolainin
Ryan Miller
Blair MacDonald
Alexander Mogilny
Pat LaFontaine
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DOMINIK HASEK
He gets a late start to his NHL career, not appearing in the game until age 28 as in real-life. He played one season with Chicago, going 17-24-6 before being exposed in the 1993 expansion draft and going to Florida. Hasek would then spend 12 years as the Panthers starting goalie before retiring in 2005 at the age of 40. He played 840 games with a 3.29 GAA and .908 career save percentage while compiling a 189-505-112 record for what was an awful team. The Panthers did not reach the playoffs at all during Hasek's tenure...in fact it took them until 2011 before they played their first post-season game. Florida won more than 22 games in a season just once when Hasek was there, going 29-43-10 in 2002-03.
Hasek ranks 4th all time in loss with 505 for his career. He trails Al Smith, Ed Belfour and Curtis Joseph in that category. Smith was an expansion pick of the Pittsburgh Penguins in 1967 and spent 19 years with a really bad Pens team pre-Lemieux, going 227-721-126. Belfour was 350-645-148 during a very long and mostly bad stretch for the Chicago Black Hawks. CuJo had a little better record (310-558-111) but went through some lean years in the mid-1990s with St Louis before ending his career in Philadelphia.
RASMUS RISTOLAINEN
Enjoyed an 18 year career with the Buffalo Sabres, winning a pair of Cups and also claiming the Norris Trophy in 2024-25. Three times a first team all-star and named to the second team two other seasons, Ristolainen played 1359 NHL games, scoring 202 goals and 843 career points. He had 39 points over the 2 playoff years the Sabres won the Cup and 113 points overall in 168 career playoff games.
Ristolainen was pretty consistent, regularly scoring about 15 goals and 55-60 points a season. His best year offensively was 2023-24 when he had a career high 19 goals (did that twice) and 79 points. He was -20 each of his first two seasons as the Sabres struggled but had a nice stretch of half a dozen years where he regularly was over +30 each season. He played until he was 37 years old.
RYAN MILLER
He spent his entire career in Buffalo but retired a couple seasons before the Sabres back to back Cup wins. Miller spent 19 years in Buffalo but was a backup much of the time as he was behind Manny Fernandez for his first few seasons and Ben Bishop later in his career. Miller only had about a five year stretch from 2006-07 until 2010-11 when he would get the majority of the starts.
In all, Miller played 659 NHL games, going 312-251-53 with a 2.60 GAA. He played 24 playoff games with a 10-13 record. He had a long career in Buffalo and is third in team wins but his reputation is nowhere near that of Ben Bishop and Rogie Vachon - who were the two great Buffalo goalies.
Bishop, who came over in a trade from St Louis in 2009, is loved in Buffalo for the two Stanley Cups he won. His NHL career - which lasted until 2024, saw him win 419 games including 383 with the Sabres. Vachon won a Cup as the backup in Montreal in 1969-70 before being selected first overall by the Sabres in the expansion draft. He would spend the next 16 seasons in the Sabres crease, helping them to a couple of finals, but they could never quite win it all.
BLAIR MACDONALD
One of the legends of the WHA, MacDonald spent over a decade with the Oilers starting in 1973-74 and remaining with the club through it's transition to the NHL before finally retiring in 1985. He played 447 games in the WHA and his 256 goals are second most in the outlaw league's history - trailing only Pat Hickey's 266. MacDonald was much less productive in the NHL, scoring just 49 times in 363 career games.
MacDonald and the Oilers won their only title in 1978-79, which was the final year for the Avco Cup. He holds the single-season WHA goal record with 65 in 1976-77 and would follow that up with 57 goals the following season.
ALEXANDER MOGILNY
His career started with such promise, just like in real-life, but he never took the big goal scoring jump like he did for a couple of years in the real world. He was nominated for the Calder Trophy in 1989-90 when he had 20 goals and 62 points as a 20 year old rookie but lost to Winnipeg's Teemu Selanne (34-42-77). Mogilny would follow that up with seasons of 37 and 38 goals before his career diverged from real life. In real life Moginly went from 30 and 39 goals in his second and third year to a 76 goal season in his fourth campaign. He would score just 24 goals in the sim and would never get more than 27 in a season for the remainder of his career.
The Sabres put him on waivers at age 27 in 1996-97 and he signed with New Jersey late in the year. He would end his career the following season with 4 goals and 11 points in 72 games with the Devils. Mogilny ended with 203 career goals and 477 points in 656 NHL games.
PAT LAFONTAINE
La la la Lafontaine - (semi-interesting side note, at least for me, in college I was a roommate of the son of longtime Sabres announcer Rick Jeanneret). Lafontaine played a season and a half with the New York Islanders before they for some reason dealt him to Philadelphia in exchange for goaltender Pete Peeters. Peeters would play well for several seasons on the Islanders but in LaFontaine's third year he scored 87 points and teamed on the top line with Tim Kerr and Brian Propp to lead the Flyers to a Stanley Cup title - the only one they ever won.
Injuries would slow LaFontaine down and limit him to just 800 career NHL games. He finished with 301 goals and 794 points, playing his final NHL game in 1996-97 at the age of 31.