Henrik Lundqvist vs. Tim Thomas: Which Goalie Is More Vital to His Team?

Tim Thomas is the chief reason the Boston Bruins are the defending Stanley Cup champions, and, for the most part, he has not been a liability in their 2011-12 season.

Henrik Lundqvist, however, is the deciding factor as to why one team is currently ahead of Boston on the Eastern Conference leaderboard. And if the New York Rangers were to derail Boston's title defense in the 2012 playoffs, they would owe it more heavily to him than the Bruins owed last year's triumph to Thomas.

In one critical respect, this year’s Lundqvist and his Rangers are not unlike Thomas and the Bruins in 2008-09. Just like the Bruins team from that season, this Rangers team is building up ahead of schedule as Stanley Cup contenders with Vezina Trophy-caliber backstopping.

But the difference between then and now is that the Rangers do not have the same depth or density to support their stopper. If everyone stays on pace, New York will finish the season with nine players having tallied at least 10 goals, three with 20-plus strikes and only Marian Gaborik exceeding 30.

Conversely, this year’s Bruins team could have as many as 11 players finishing with double digits in their goal column, five with 20 or more and three in the 30-goal range. The edition of this team that plowed to the top of the conference three seasons ago had seven players with at least 20 tallies at the end of the regular season.

When the majority or all of its skaters come prepared, Boston is a decisively greater offensive threat both in five-on-five action and on the power play.

The Bruins are second only to Detroit for the league lead with a 1.54 even-strength success rate, while the Rangers are fourth with a 1.35 rating. Boston’s power play is tied for 10th in the league, having converted 18.6 percent of its chances, whereas New York is tied for 27th, capitalizing on only 13.1 percent of its chances.

With a slimmer selection of scorers, the Rangers need to rely all the more on Lundqvist to keep them in games when the strike force is in a slump or simply struggling against a rigid opposing stopper.

Not counting empty-netters, 20 of Lundqvist’s first 39 decisions this season have been decided by a single goal. In nine cases, his efforts have allowed the Rangers to secure at least one point by forcing overtime.

In 35 appearances and 22 wins to date this season, Thomas has been granted a multi-goal cushion on 12 occasions. Colleague Tuukka Rask has had a similar luxury in seven of his first 20 outings.

And with his already impressive transcript and promise for enhancement down the road, the 24-year-old Rask makes Thomas relatively expendable in the Boston crease. The same cannot be said about Martin Biron, the Rangers’ journeyman backup who is Lundqvist’s senior by about four-and-a-half years.

Biron, a veteran of 492 NHL games in four different organizations dating back to 1995-96, is capable enough, as evidenced by his 9-2-1 record this season. But head coach John Tortorella is less inclined to give Lundqvist a breather than Boston counterpart Claude Julien is to relieve Thomas in favor of Rask.

Look no further than the first, and so far only, meeting between the two Eastern Conference titans on Jan. 21. Lundqvist got the nod for New York while Thomas assumed doorman duties on the Bruins' bench and watched Rask engage in an entertaining staring contest that culminated in Gaborik’s power-play overtime goal.

Had the goaltending card been reversed, odds are Thomas would have bolstered a Bruins’ regulation victory with the help of a few Biron breakdowns.

Tortorella could trust no one but Lundqvist to neutralize the league’s most prolific offense. But Julien could give either one of his stoppers the nod to counter the Rangers’ gold-medalist goalie, who will likely accept his first Vezina in June.