Antti Niemi, a 26-year-old Finn with no N.H.L. playoff experience and an annual salary of $827,000, has received the nod as the Blackhawks’ No. 1 goalie this postseason. They will start Friday night in the opening-round series against the Nashville Predators. Cristobal Huet, the Blackhawks’ $5.6 million goalie, will be on the bench.The Chicago Blackhawks have spent a great deal of funds locking in a quantity of the league’s best young talent, but they enter the playoffs having to rely on an untested goalie they acquired on the cheap.
“I don’t know why you guys are asking me so plenty of questions about him,” the Blackhawks’ captain, Jonathan Toews, said this week when reporters asked if his teammates had confidence in Niemi. “We know he’s going to play great.”
Niemi signed with the Blackhawks’ organization in 2008 after one seasons with Pelicans Lahti, also-rans in the Finnish SM-liiga. They did not distinguish himself last season, his first in North The united states, with Chicago’s American Hockey League farm team, the Rockford IceHogs.
Yet here they is, Pelicans to IceHogs to one of the N.H.L.’s glamour clubs, mainly because the Blackhawks needed a cheap goalie after gobbling up cap space to sign their star skaters, and because Huet played himself out of the beginning job.
Although the Blackhawks say they have not given up on Huet — “goaltending in the playoffs is a two-man job, even if one goalie doesn’t get in to the game,” said Scotty Bowman, the nine-time Stanley Cup-winning coach who is a special adviser to the Blackhawks — the fact remains that Huet’s .895 save percentage was 45th among the league’s 47 regular goalies this season.
Niemi’s was much better: a middle of the pack .912, which makes him the Blackhawks’ man.
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