The Calgary Roughnecks winless one third of the way through the 2015 NLL season. When a team gets off to such a poor start there is usually plenty of blame to go around. But one of the main targets of scrutiny for the Roughnecks right now is the goaltending tandem of Mike Poulin and Frankie Scigliano.
The Poulin Wall has been one of the keys to success for the Roughnecks over the last several years. In 2012 he even won the league’s Goaltender of the Year award, making him the only goalie not named Matt Vinc to win the award in the last five years. Between 2011 and 2014, Poulin’s time on the bench could be measured in minutes, not games—the two games he missed in 2012 were due to injury, putting him in the press box, not on the pine.
It has been a different story in 2015 for Poulin. He played just 39:34 of the season opener, managed to play most of the second game of the season but gave up 17 goals, sat for 10 minutes of Game 3, and didn’t even see the floor in Game 4. Since then, he has logged just three and a half minutes of game time and has given up a goal on two shots in that time.
Poulin’s numbers this year are the worst of his career, by far. His 17.22 goals against average is five and a half goals worse than his career average; his .621 save percentage is a .140 drop off from his career average and has put him at the very bottom of the NLL goalie list among netminders with at least 150 minutes logged.
Which brings us to Frankie Scigliano.
Coach Curt Malawsky has handed the starting job to Big Frankie for the last three games. Scigliano hasn’t started back-to-back games since his rookie season, when he subbed in for Poulin while Poulin was recovering from injury. In those two games, he performed admirably, posting a 10.70 GAA.
Since then, his numbers have been less impressive, but that may be at least partly due to spending most of his time on the bench watching Poulin work his magic. But this year he is getting his shot to be the No. 1 guy for the Roughnecks.
While he has certainly performed better than Poulin this year, Scigliano still hasn’t been dominant. In just over 211 minutes of play, he has played to a 12.77 GAA and a .749 GAA. That places him eighth out of 12 qualified goalies in the NLL in goals against and seventh in save percentage.
Realistically, Scigliano deserves a better fate than the 0-4 record he’s currently saddled with. But if the Roughnecks have any hope of getting back into the playoff picture, either he’s going to have to step his game way up or Poulin will have to reclaim the starting role and rediscover his game in a big way.
