Stuart Skinner offers little in the way of championship onomatopoeia, which is to say his name does not suggest athletic greatness. It suggests the secretary-treasurer of the chess club, or an unprepared con artist trying to spontaneously impersonate Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg.
But Skinner owns, for now, the Stanley Cup fate of the Edmonton Oilers, and by extension the possibility that a Canadian team might win it all for the first time since 1993. As the Oilers' goaltender he has defined both the glories and horrors of being an Oil fan, because there is never a guarantee of what level of quality he will provide.
Skinner's story as a goalie has always veered wildly from excellence to excrescence. On Tuesday night, following a 4-1 Oilers victory over the Dallas Stars to move within one win of a second straight Stanley Cup Final, he was the best goalie in the sport. A month ago, after the Los Angeles Kings had dope-slapped him in the first two games of their first-round series, he lost his job to a guy named Calvin Pickard. (And since we're on that subject of goalie names, let us ask if the Oilers scouting department looks for goaltenders in library science classes.) Skinner had been trusted with the task of freeing Connor McDavid from the purgatory of being the best player in the sport without a ring, and early in the process that trust was rejected with force and intent. He gave up six goals in the team's first game against the Kings, backed that up with five goals in Game 2, and was summarily replaced by head coach Kris Knoblauch with Pickard.
Pickard, though, got injured in a collision with Vegas's Tomas Hertl in Game 2 of the Oilers' second-round series, and Skinner returned to much Albertan consternation. The Oilers lost Game 3, and the power of their 2-0 series lead looked much diminished. Skinner had been pre-assigned as the reason for the looming failure because, well, who else ya got?
But since then, his goals allowed line reads 0, 0, 5, 0, 1 and 1. Tuesday was Good Skinner Incarnate, as he turned away 28 of 29 shots and made a numerically close game seem one-sided. It was his third consecutive 10-bell performance, and it turned a seemingly difficult series into one where the Oilers can enjoy a hefty cushion.
The ESPN broadcast crew of Sean McDonough, Ray Ferraro and Emily Kaplan could not effuse enough on his behalf last night as Skinner unspectacularly but persistently rendered the Stars inert. Now that the Oilers are up 3-1, it is reasonable to start thinking not only about the return of Good Stuart but about his likely rematch with the Florida Panthers and their goalie, Bob. His actual name is Sergei Bobrovsky, but we haven't called him anything but Bob for years. Bob sounds like safe hands, in large part because he's been an elite goalie long enough—he is 37, that's how long—to make eight figures a year.
If Florida and Edmonton both close out their series, all the talk will be about how the Stu-Bob showdown will tilt the Final one way or the other. But this of course is nonsense, since the goalies don't actually play against each other. The real truth is that the Oilers' future will be determined by the winner of STUART SKINNER versus stuart skinner—Canada's hero or Edmonton's curse. That's a lot to put on a guy named Stuart Skinner.
