Name: Tom Barrasso
Team: Pittsburgh Penguins
Position: Goaltender
Card Year: 1991
Card Maker: Upper Deck
Card Number: 116
We've gone from a draft bust last week to a Stanley Cup champion this week in the 1990-1991 Penguins' starting goalie, Tom Barrasso.
Barrasso's career started in with the 1983-84 Buffalo Sabres where as a rookie, he won both the Calder Memorial Trophy and the Vezina Trophy. One of only three athletes to have ever won both awards in the same season.
He remained the starter in Buffalo through the 87-88 season until being traded to the Penguins in 1988 for a third round draft pick, with playing time split between several goalies and a general drop in performance.
His life then took a dramatic turn during his first season with the Penguins, as his then two-year-old daughter was diagnosed with cancer and was given just a 10% chance of survival. He took a leave of absence from the team to be with her during treatment, and miraculously she survived. As her health improved and she was able to go home, Barrasso returned to the Penguins.
His performance rebounded significantly in the 1990-91 season with his GAA dropping to 3.59 and a team record 27 wins with an additional 12 wins in the playoffs. However, just purely on vibes - this GAA still seemed really high. With hockey being the relatively low-scoring sport that it is, it just seemed odd that the best team's goalie was still nearly giving up 4 goals per game.
My first thought was well, this is the early 90s Pittsburgh Penguins. They might be giving up a lot of goals, but then presumably they're scoring a lot as well. They have Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr! But that wasn't entirely the case - Lemieux missed most of the season with a back injury (he was back for the playoffs which surely helped) and Jagr was a rookie with a very respectable 27 goals, but he was not yet the monster he would soon become.
What really carried this team was - all the other guys who were scoring goals. Mark Recchi and Kevin Stevens both led the team with 40 goals a piece and they had 7 players with at least 20 goals. They were only second to the Calgary Flames in average goals scored which was good because their GAA led by Barrasso was also the 4th highest in the league. However, given their overall depth and with Lemieux's playoff MVP performance in the playoffs, it ultimately did not matter.
So while Barrasso did enough to get the Penguin's the team's first Stanley Cup, I still wanted to see if there was a league-wide trend in scoring, especially as previously stated - this was the Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr (and Wayne Gretzky and Theo Fleury etc.) era so below you can see GAA over time where 1990-91 is where the peak starts to drop off, and seemingly every team had a goalie giving up over 3.5 goals per game. Defense apparently just did not really matter in the 80s and early 90s.
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| Data from Pro Hockey Reference |
Tom Barrasso went on to win another Stanley Cup in the 1991-92 season as Pittsburgh repeated. He also led the league in wins that season, while ending up 2nd in Vezina trophy voting behind Ed Belfour who Barrasso ultimately bested in the Stanley Cup Finals. His 19-year career ended with limited time in Toronto, Carolina, Ottawa, and St. Louis. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2023.
Sources:
Sports Illustrated Vault
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