Tristan Jarry's best won't be good enough for Team Canada
One of Canada's best NHL goalies this season will not be going to the Olympics, but he's doing some great things for the Pittsburgh Penguins
When each country had to submit its long list of Olympic candidates on Oct. 15, the Pittsburgh Penguins had played only two games and Tristan Jarry had appeared in only one of them. So Hockey Canada essentially had Jarry’s implosion in the first round of the playoffs last spring as its most recent body of work. And that’s why, even though Jarry has been one of Canada’s best NHL goalies through the first quarter of the season, he won’t be on the team that goes to Beijing in February.
When Hockey Canada was putting its long list together, it did not include Jarry in its group of 55 hopefuls. (The International Olympic Committee mandated each country submit a long list of players for drug-testing purposes. For most countries it’s not an issue, but it was a huge one for Canada and, to a lesser extent, USA.) After Carey Price, Marc-Andre Fleury, Darcy Kuemper, Jordan Binnington, Carter Hart and Mackenzie Blackwood, there simply was no room for a goalie who had an .888 save percentage in the playoff last year. Which is a shame because you could make the argument that of those six goalies, the only one who has outperformed him this season has been Hart. To be sure, Jarry has been the Penguins most consistent and best player so far this season.
And even if Hockey Canada didn’t have room for him, the Penguins were able to put aside last season’s playoff debacle and continue to show faith in him. That faith has been rewarded with a Jarry reset and much-improved play. “I think just, ‘Be better,’ ” Jarry said after a 26-save effort in a 2-0 shutout of the Toronto Maple Leafs Saturday night. “That was my mindset going into the summer. I wanted to work hard to be a better goalie.”
And a big key to that was the work of new Penguins goalie coach Andy Chiodo, who worked with Jarry periodically over the summer. For Jarry, it was important that he show up at training camp ready to prove he could be a No. 1 goaltender in the NHL, and working with Chiodo “was something that got my game where it needed to be coming to Pittsburgh, not when I arrived. That was something that helped me a lot.”
It did not take long for Chiodo to realize that Jarry was committed to making things right after the playoffs last spring. The Penguins, who were plagued with goaltending problems going back to the regression of Matt Murray, fired goalie coach Mike Buckley over the summer and replaced him with Chiodo, who had been mentoring the organization’s stoppers as its goaltending development coach. Chiodo visited Jarry in the off-season and saw quickly that he had already put the 2021 playoffs in the past. The two had worked together when Jarry was in the minors and Chiodo had a pretty good idea of his mental make-up.
“There’s an energy you can feel, it’s hard to put your finger on,” Chiodo said. “But I know Tristan well. I trust Tristan, I believe in him and you could tell through conversation, through body language, through demeanour, he wants it. He cares. He cares a lot. I see so much good in him. I definitely think Tristan has earned, from Day 1 in training camp, the opportunity to play games, the opportunity to have people believe in him.”
And the Penguins have that belief. Jarry is just 26 years old, which is the time that a lot of goalies begin to figure things out. He has played 141 games in the minors and 115 in the NHL at a position where it often takes about 200 pro games for a player to hit his stride. He has not a lot of playoff success since winning the Memorial Cup with the Edmonton Oil Kings in 2014, but the foundation is there.
“We believe he’s capable of doing great things,” said Penguins coach Mike Sullivan. “He’s a guy who has so much upside and so much potential. When he’s on his game, he’s as good as the top goaltenders in the league and we know he’s capable of that. It’s more about just managing his mindset and staying in the moment and not getting overwhelmed by any circumstances that come his way.”
It was also important to Jarry that the Penguins continued to show their faith in him. “Hexy (Penguins GM and former NHL goaltender Ron Hextall) and I had a lot of conversations over the summer and that was something that motivated me to be better and motivated me to work harder every day,” Jarry said. “It was something that was a sign of relief that I knew I would be coming back and I wanted to prove to them that they weren’t making a mistake.”
It appears the Penguins were not making a mistake. But Hockey Canada just might have.