#59 - Grant Fuhr

Grant Fuhr (Murillo Pyramid Rank = #58)

Adjusted Stats

1981-1982   Edm       49 GP, 29-5-14, .750 win%, 2918 min, 123 GA, 2.53 GAA
1982-1983   Edm       33 GP, 13-12-5, .517 win%, 1848 min, 105 GA, 3.42 GAA
1983-1984   Edm*     46 GP, 31-10-4, .733 win%, 2691 min, 137 GA, 3.05 GAA
1984-1985   Edm*     47 GP, 27-8-7, .726 win%, 2623 min, 134 GA, 3.06 GAA
1985-1986   Edm       41 GP, 30-8-0, .789 win%, 2239 min, 114 GA, 3.04 GAA
1986-1987   Edm*     45 GP, 23-13-3, .628 win%, 2448 min, 118 GA, 2.88 GAA
1987-1988   Edm*     77 GP, 41-25-9, .607 win%, 4412 min, 209 GA, 2.84 GAA
1988-1989   Edm       60 GP, 24-27-6, .474 win%, 3425 min, 180 GA, 3.15 GAA
1989-1990   Edm*     22 GP, 9-7-3, .553 win%, 1108 min, 60 GA, 3.24 GAA (no Stanley Cup ring for Fuhr)
1990-1991   Edm       13 GP, 6-4-3, .577 win%, 797 min, 36 GA, 2.68 GAA
1991-1992   Tor         68 GP, 26-34-5, .438 win%, 3868 min, 208 GA, 3.23 GAA
1992-1993   Tor/Buf   57 GP, 23-23-6, .500 win%, 3279 min, 153 GA, 2.80 GAA
1993-1994   Buf        31 GP, 13-12-3, .518 win%, 1685 min, 98 GA, 3.50 GAA
1994-1995   Buf/LA  29 GP, 3-15-5, .239 win%, 1500 min, 104 GA, 4.15 GAA
1995-1996   Stl        79 GP, 30-28-16, .514 win%, 4365 min, 204 GA, 2.81 GAA
1996-1997   Stl        73 GP, 33-27-11, .542 win%, 4261 min, 204 GA, 2.87 GAA
1997-1998   Stl        58 GP, 29-21-6, .571 win%, 3274 min, 161 GA, 2.95 GAA
1998-1999   Stl        39 GP, 16-11-8, .571 win%, 2193 min, 104 GA, 2.84 GAA
1999-2000   Cgy      23 GP, 5-13-2, .300 win%, 1205 min, 86 GA, 4.29 GAA

Adjusted Playoff Stats

1981-1982   Edm      5 GP, 2-3, .400 win%, 309 min, 20 GA, 3.94 GAA
1982-1983   Edm      1 GP, 0-0, --- win%, 11 min, 0 GA, 0.00 GAA
1983-1984   Edm*    16 GP, 11-4, .733 win%, 883 min, 39 GA, 2.66 GAA
1984-1985   Edm*    18 GP, 15-3, .833 win%, 1064 min, 41 GA, 2.33 GAA
1985-1986   Edm      9 GP, 5-4, .556 win%, 541 min, 24 GA, 2.68 GAA
1986-1987   Edm*    19 GP, 14-5, .737 win%, 1148 min, 42 GA, 2.20 GAA
1987-1988   Edm*    19 GP, 16-2, .889 win%, 1136 min, 41 GA, 2.18 GAA
1988-1989   Edm      7 GP, 3-4, .429 win%, 417 min, 21 GA, 2.97 GAA
1990-1991   Edm      17 GP, 8-7, .533 win%, 1019 min, 43 GA, 2.56 GAA
1992-1993   Buf        8 GP, 3-4, .429 win%, 474 min, 22 GA, 2.81 GAA
1995-1996   Stl         2 GP, 1-0, 1.000 win%, 69 min, 1 GA, 0.83 GAA
1996-1997   Stl         6 GP, 2-4, .333 win%, 357 min, 14 GA, 2.30 GAA
1997-1998   Stl         10 GP, 6-4, .600 win%, 616 min, 31 GA, 3.04 GAA
1998-1999   Stl         13 GP, 6-6, .500 win%, 790 min, 34 GA, 2.58 GAA

Career - 890 GP, 411-303-116, .565 win%, 50139 min, 2538 GA, 3.04 GAA
Career-Highs - 79 GP (95-96); 41 wins (87-88); .789 win% (85-86); 4412 min (87-88); 2.53 GAA (81-82)
Avg. (19 seasons) - 47 GP, 22-16-6, .565 win%, 3134 min, 159 GA, 3.04 GAA
Peak Avg. (81-89) - 50 GP, 27-14-6, .638 win%, 2826 min, 140 GA, 2.97 GAA, 4 Cups

Playoff Career - 150 GP, 92-50, .648 win%, 8834 min, 373 GA, 2.53 GAA
Playoff-Highs - 16 wins (87-88); .889 win% (87-88); 2.20 GAA (86-87)

Accolades - 1 Vezina Trophy, 1 Jennings
All-Star Teams - 1-time 1st-team, 1-time 2nd-team
4-time Stanley Cup Champion

In terms of regular-season credentials, Grant Fuhr really doesn't deserve to be this high on the Pyramid. It's debatable if he even deserves to be on it at all. A career 3.04 adjusted-GAA just doesn't stack up with some of the other greats, nor does the fact that during his peak, Fuhr essentially split regular-season duties with Andy Moog. But that's one of the reasons I wanted to do this: to remind myself in future years of the players who actually mattered. I'd hate for someone thirty years from now to look at the numbers and decide that Curtis Joseph made more of an impact than Grant Fuhr...it's not true.

Ask any hockey fan who the best goaltender of the 1980s was and, after a bit of thought, the first name they'll probably come up with is Grant Fuhr. Of course, being the best goalie of the 1980s is a little like being the top home run hitter of the Dead Ball era, or the hottest woman of the 1920s...it's something of a dubious honour. Yet it still has to count for something. There's a reason that Fuhr was the starting goaltender for the 1987 Canada Cup team...because when the chips were down, you could count on him.

In his book about the Oilers' dynasty, Kevin Lowe talks at length about how Fuhr was, to him, the best goalie in the league because the only statistic that mattered for goaltenders was wins, and Fuhr won. If the game was 9-3 for the Oilers, Fuhr may not have tried his hardest to stop it from getting to 9-5. But if it was 4-3, more often than not, he didn't let in that fourth goal. These anecdotal attempts to ignore Fuhr's mediocre regular-season numbers may not be completely convincing, but I do believe that Fuhr's reputation as a big-game goalie was well-earned.

He was one of the most athletic and reflex-dependent goalies the game had seen, so one wonders whether or not Fuhr would have been even more successful had he come into the league ten years later, when the science of goaltending was reaching its apex. There is also the matter of Fuhr's career becoming derailed after his Oiler days, when he battled a cocaine habit and was relegated to backup duties with the Maple Leafs, Sabres and Kings. But Fuhr ended on a positive note, re-establishing himself as one of the league's best goaltenders with the St. Louis Blues. He was a workhorse in his late 30s and made spectacular saves on a nightly basis, keeping a fairly mediocre Blues team in contention. It was Fuhr's injury in the 1996 playoffs that essentially sealed the Blues fate...I don't know that Fuhr lets in the Steve Yzerman shot in Game 7 that Jon Casey did.

Though Fuhr's regular season numbers are underwhelming (except of course for wins), his reputation, and his place on the Pyramid, are due to his postseason success. Could any competent goalie have backstopped the Oilers' powerhouse to four Stanley Cup rings? Maybe, maybe not...the same argument was leveled against Billy Smith and Ken Dryden. The fact is, while Fuhr and Moog split time in the regular season, it was Fuhr the Oilers trusted when it came to the postseason. That tells you all you need to know about how Fuhr's game elevated to the next level come playoff time (as if his 92 playoff wins and four Stanley Cup rings weren't enough).

Since statistics will prove to be Fuhr's enemy as the years go by and future generations stupidly decide that Grant Fuhr was a terrible goalie lucky enough to be on a good team, I'll close out the entry on Fuhr with one telling statistic: his career save percentage in the playoffs was 13 points higher than it was in the regular season. In comparison, Roy's was 8 points higher, Brodeur's 6. So maybe there was something to Lowe's theory that Fuhr took it easy in the middle of an 8-2 blowout in the middle of January, but knuckled down when everything was on the line in May. A goalie's job is to win...if they're lucky enough to be playing for an offensive powerhouse, that shouldn't be held against them. Fuhr could certainly have had a better career, but we shouldn't forget that for the majority of the 1980s, he was the goalie that mattered.