With a look under the hood, Sam Montembeault’s numbers are a vast improvement from other Panther goalies this season.
Thanks to the great Sean Tierney, here is a shot map viz with stats for Montembeault’s first four games. He’s not been hugely taxed, and he hasn’t over or underperformed either. He’s faced about 9.2 xG and given up 9 goals.
For the Panthers, that’s a far cry from both Luongo (105 goals on 90.54 xG) and Reimer (89 on 79.04 xG) in a good way.
Four games are too small of a sample size to derive anything franchise-changing from, but him getting these starts and not looking out-of-place in most of them is a start of something.