Goalies matched save for save

There are plenty of differences between Jonathan Quick and Mike Smith. Just not in their statistics. In the regular season, Quick had a 1.95 goals-against average and a .929 save percentage, while Smith had a 2.21 goals-against average and a .930 save percentage. So far in this postseason, Quick has a 1.55 goals-against average and a .949 save percentage, while Smith has a 1.77 goals-against average and a .948 save percentage. Over seven months, the two goalies have saved almost exactly the same percentage of shots. Jarret Stoll and Phoenix coach Dave Tippett talked about the matchup and the strengths of both goalies…

STOLL: “(Smith) covers a lot of net. He plays big. He’s very athletic, too. He’s obviously a good athlete. We’re going to have to shoot as many possible shots at him, get second-chance opportunities, make him work, make him move side to side. It’s going to have to be a pretty good shot to beat him clean. He’s pretty much like our goaltender. Everybody knows that. We have to make it hard on him. Like any good goalie, make him work a lot, make it tough by getting a lot of shots, be around the crease, get all three guys ending up at the crease, you know, be hungry.’’

TIPPETT: “We’re a team that, we really rely on what we’re doing. Believe me, we think we’ve got a great goaltender. We recognize they have a great goaltender. Some of the goaltending, they play a good defending game. They allow their goaltender to have some success. We feel like we can do the same thing. We’re a lot more geared to what we do. Obviously there’s some things from a goaltender’s perspective that we’ll run by our guys, areas that we think might be vulnerable. That’s no different than any other team. The two goalies in this series are going to be critiqued very hard because a lot of it is, they’ve played very well and they play a different kind of style. We’ll talk about that. But other than that, we’ll let the games play out.’’