When watching this game, I really wanted to pay attention to Anderson’s play after some guys raised concern about his “flopping” and taking too long to get up.

To me, it’s not that Anderson is taking too long to get up, but rather is going down a little too early in some situations. He seems to bite a little early on shots from the boards (I’m giving him a pass on the Keith goal because Versteeg had a clear lane to the net, was eyes on the net the whole way, and 3 Avs defenders got caught staring at the puck, with their backs to Keith).

What makes Anderson different than most current goalies in this situation is that after he drops to his butterfly, he gets back up and does a T push on his skates to get back to the center of the net. He doesn’t raise his far leg from the butterfly position and do a push to execute a butterfly slide across the crease. This is where I think some people are saying that Anderson is taking too long to get back into position. What Anderson is doing may not be as pretty as a butterfly silde. But, butterfly slides are not always the desired movement; they should be reserved for plays in close, from the faceoff circles down and inwards. You definitely don’t want to get caught in a form over function argument, which is all too common with a strict butterfly ideology (and I think something that was all too common with Budaj last year).

A goaltender needs to know how to abandon style and make the desperation save. You saw it on that wrap around almost goal by Fraser. Anderson got beat, but had the presence of mind to dive back and make a great save. Even Fleury’s save on Lidstrom in the waning second of game 7 last year: Fleury dove across the crease and got his chest in front of the puck. And what did he have to say about it? “I was just glad he didn’t shoot low.” He didn’t perform some pretty butterfly slide. He did what he had to do to get there as quick as he could.

On the other hand, I felt that there was a situation where Anderson was TOO quick to get to his feet: The Madden goal. The Madden goal was a broken play: There was a shot from the point that Anderson went down on. But, because of traffic in front of the net, the puck never got too him and he quickly rose to his feet to look for the puck while Madden pounced on the loose puck and fired it in. Those are "blocking"situations. A goalie with lots of traffic in front of him, should have stayed in the butterfly position, flaring his legs out wide to create the largest blocking area. This gives the goalie a chance to make the save solely on positioning and perhaps allow him to be in position for the rebound by being closer to the puck. This isn’t even a strictly butterfly school of thought, either. Russian goalie Tretiak was playing with the philosophy “the closer the puck, the closer you play to the ice” 30+ years ago. By getting back to his feet so quickly, Anderson actually took himself out of the play.

As for the shoot out, ideally, a goalie should skate out towards the shooter, keeping his feet moving to back in and force the shooter to pick a side by the time the goalie gets to the top of his crease. Then, the goalie should make an explosive move from the top of the crease, towards the post. This is called the Y theory on breakaways.

Anderson got burnt in making the first move on those first two goals. It’s impressive that he was able to correct this moving forward in the shoot out. But, even on the saves that he was making, I felt that he wasn’t concentrating on his skating, allowing himself to simply drift back and ending up too deep in his crease in most of the situations, or falling forwards, legs spread eagle behind him. Then again, the shoot out is such a small part of the game and a goalie in Luongo who is considered to be amongst the best often has these same criticisms about how he plays the shoot out. And again, you don’t want to get caught up in a form over function debate; he did make the saves after all. It just looked like Anderson wasn’t as sharp as he could’ve been. My guess is that Sacco hasn’t practiced shoot out situations as much (as evidenced by his selecting Hendricks over Galiardi, Liles, etc.).

I don’t mean all of this to be a harsh criticism of Anderson’s game. I was excited when the Avs signed him. He’s a goalie that’s got something to prove. He controls his rebounds well and has some swagger in his game. I simply wanted to try to explain what people are saying in his game, based on a goalie’s perspective.