Earlier in the regular season, Philadelphia Flyers head coach John Tortorella mentioned that the reason he was giving Samuel Ersson so many starts was because he wanted his young goaltender to get accustomed to a starting goaltending workload. That workload has left Ivan Fedotov in the dust which does nothing to help him finding his groove at the NHL level.
In the middle stages of the season, the Flyers decided that Aleksei Kolosov was the number two goalie, which pushed Fedotov to the press box and afforded him only 8 starts between the 23rd of October and the 4th of January.
Fedotov still managed a 4-2-1 record in those 8 games, posting a .893 SV% and allowing 22 goals, which included a short leash in his final start during that stretch against Florida after allowing 2 goals on 7 shots.
Within that cluster of games he won his first game of the season by taking down Tampa Bay in a shootout as he stopped 22 of 23 shots, stopped 23 of 25 shots against Buffalo, and 22 of 23 shots against the New York Rangers. He looked way better than his early season performances but he never got another look until January.
Since the Florida game, he’s appeared in 11 contests, of which he’s started 10 and has posted a 1-7-2 record with a .891 SV% and a GAA just north of 2.70. He played relatively well against Toronto, Columbus, and the New York Islanders twice but the team in front of him couldn’t get the job done offensively.
After getting 6 games in the month of January, Fedotov only played once in February but has seen action four times in March, where he’s stopped 94 of the 103 shots fired his way with just one win to show for it, which came against the Winnipeg Jets on the road.
Fedotov isn’t blowing the door off its hinges but he has performed very well, considering all the factors at hand. With just so few games in a span of months with press box visits in between, he’s played very well as a backup netminder and should earn a few more starts down the stretch – should being the operative word.
As good as Ersson can be and has been, he is continuing his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde impersonation with a stretch of great games followed by a stretch of really bad games.
Between the 8th of December to the 23rd of December, Ersson posted a 2-4-0 record with a .810 SV%, and 24 goals allowed in 6 games.
Between the 28th of December to the 8th of February, Ersson posted a 9-4-1 record, a .920 SV%, and just 30 goals allowed in 14 games.
Between the 22nd of February to the 8th of March, Ersson has posted a 2-2-1 record, .847 SV%, and 20 goals allowed in 5+ games.
Even beyond that, in his first games 6 games of the regular season he allowed 19 goals in 5+ games with a .872 SV% compared to his next 5 games where he allowed just 7 goals and stopped 94% of the shots fired his way.
Dating back to after Carter Hart’s departure from the Flyers, Ersson has started in 66 out of 102 games for the Flyers but it could very easily be counted as 66 of 86 games due to him missing out on 16 games this season due to injury.
You can equate some games into the mix due to the nature of being a goaltender but that’s still roughly 76.7% of the games he’s featured in when healthy, which would give him over 60 games in a full 82-game season – and only three goaltenders started and featured in 60 games last year.
And within that many games, we’ve seen the highest of highs and the lowest of lows from Ersson, which begs the question as to why Tortorella is so hellbent on getting Ersson used to a starter’s workload when: 1) he’s at best a fringe number one at the moment, 2) we need to see more from their backups like Fedotov to better evaluate the position moving forward, and 3) his injury history is mounting.
Number one goalies don’t usually take on that workload anymore outside of a few, so why not ease it down a bit to maybe a 50/30-ish split?
Kolosov finally made his way back down to the Lehigh Valley Phantoms and has gotten in a few games, so hopefully he can remain in the AHL without anymore issues and get some much needed playing time and experience before getting another recall.
The Flyers only have two more back-to-back sets until the end of the season, which will be coming on the 22nd and 23 of March and the 12th and 13th of April. With 16 games remaining on the schedule, there should be almost no reason to run Ersson into the ground again.
There’s no playoff push like there was last year, there are far less issues regarding their backup situation compared to last year when Cal Petersen and Felix Sandström couldn’t stop a beach ball, and allowing Ersson to catch his breath and ease into the offseason should be a priority considering he’ll likely get the same workload to start the 2025-26 season.
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