Ruff: Goalie tandem the ‘backbone’ of Stars’ success

After the Dallas Stars' second-round series ended in a 6-1 blowout loss to the St. Louis Blues on home ice, many are calling for a change to their inconsistent goaltending tandem of Kari Lehtonen and Antti Niemi.

One person who sees no reason to overreact, though, is head coach Lindy Ruff, who praised his two goaltenders when asked about them by Mike Heika of The Dallas Morning News.

"I think that I'm going to continue with what I said all along, we finished second overall, we had two goalies that won us 25 games," Ruff said. "We had two goalies that I think were the backbone of where we got to and I know that you'd want some back. Every time you lose a game you want something back and I think that's hard, but these two guys did a real good job for us."

While both goaltenders finished the regular season with save percentages above .900, they struggled throughout the playoffs. Lehtonen finished with a mark of .899 beside his 6-3 record, while Niemi went 1-3 with an awful .865 save percentage.

Despite their inconsistency, Ruff sees no need to choose one netminder over the other next year - with both Finns under contract for the next two seasons.

"No, I don't," Ruff said, when asked if there needs to be one starting goalie. "You can write any story you want, we used two guys the whole year. They were comfortable with it. It might have been the reason we got to where we got to. It's not the reason we lost."

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