Will Steve Mason's Knee Injury Sink the Philadelphia Flyers in 2014-15?

The good news is that the Philadelphia Flyers seem to have solved their goaltending problems with Steve Mason. The bad news is that even as the team fights desperately for a chance at the final playoff berth in the East, Mason is sidelined with a knee injury.

We might as well start with the injury. Last week, Flyers general manager Ron Hextall told NHL.com that arthroscopic surgery on Mason’s right knee was successful, and the originally reported time frame of two to three weeks still stood.

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“Two is probably a little bit of a stretch,” Hextall said. “He's got to get on the ice, he's got to get comfortable and then he's got to get a few practices in. There's a chance he could be on the ice before then.”

The injury comes at a crucial point in Philadelphia’s season. Entering action on Wednesday, the Flyers were six points back of Boston for the final wild-card spot in the East with the Bruins holding a game in hand and the tiebreaker (non-shootout wins).

Boston is currently on pace for 94 points and is the only team within striking distance. With only 25 contests left on the schedule, Philadelphia will likely need to go something like 17-5-3 to make the postseason.

Even under perfect conditions, that would be quite a run for a team that is nine games under .500 (to forestall inevitable criticism, please note that a 24-23-10 record is actually the same thing as 24 wins and 33 losses and not nearly good enough to get a team into the playoffs). Mason’s injury makes conditions far worse than perfect.

Philadelphia has already played four games without its starting goalie; it has dropped three losses and only managed to beat the lowly Buffalo Sabres thanks to a late third-period goal from Michael Raffl.

Ray Emery has been reasonably competent filling in for Mason, posting a .908 save percentage over those four games to help improve his numbers on the season, but “reasonably competent” isn’t going to do the trick for a team in need of something resembling a miracle.  

The incredible thing is that with Mason, it might just be possible. The Flyers were loudly criticized by many, including yours truly, for turning to a goalie who had almost single-handedly sabotaged the Columbus Blue Jackets for three-plus seasons, but so far that gamble has paid off for them.

Mason has played 107 games for Philadelphia and faced more than 3,000 shots since arriving from Columbus; over that span he has a very impressive 0.923 save percentage, a number well above the NHL average. He had a good first season as starter in 2013-14, but the incredible thing is that he managed to build on it this season rather than falling back to his career average.

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The Flyers need well above-average goaltending if they are to make a serious run at the postseason, and while Mason might have provided it, there is little to suggest that Emery can. He did go on an insane 17-1-0 run with Chicago in 2012-13, posting a .922 save percentage in the process, but the Flyers are not the Blackhawks. In the two years since with Philadelphia, he’s struggled just to keep himself on the right side of the .900 line.  

If Mason is out for the full three weeks, the Flyers’ season could be over by the time he gets back. That timeline takes the team to March 5, eight games from now. Importantly, six of the contests Philadelphia will play in the meantime will come at home (where the team is 15-8-4 as opposed to 9-15-6 on the road).

It’s a situation where the Flyers could make some much needed progress with a strong performance, but that’s going to be difficult to manage if Emery plays to the level that he’s been at for most of his time in Philly.  

These eight games are absolutely critical; the Flyers probably need to win six of them to keep themselves alive. That was going to be hard to do with Mason. It will be much more difficult without him.

Statistics courtesy of NHL.com. 

Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work.