Mar 11, 2017 5 min read

Marc Andre Fleury is a better goaltender than Matt Murray.

I know the statistics don’t back me up, but I’m basing it on what I’ve seen the last few weeks and the last 12 years.

Going into last night’s game in Vancouver, Murray had been struggling and Fleury was coming off a 40-save, shootout win by the Penguins in Edmonton.

Murray is still a rookie and he was the Penguins’ No. 1 goalie in their Stanley Cup run last year. The Penguins are lucky to have him, but in my eyes Fleury’s body of work tells me he has a lot of good years left and he will be a better choice for this year’s playoffs.

It’s possible Murray is about to come down to Earth because he’s been around long enough for opponents to get a book on him. All goalies and pitchers go through it. The great ones adjust to their opponents’ adjustments.

The book is still out on him.

Fleury has been around forever but don’t think for a minute that, at 32, he’s old. He’s just entering his prime.

Martin Brodeur played until he was 42 and had his best save percentage when he was 34.

Dominik Hasek had a .913 save percentage and 2.05 goals-against average when he was 42.

Patrick Roy had a .925 and a 1.94 – the best numbers of his career – when he was 36.

Most of the great goalies had most of their best years after 31 or 32.

I have a feeling the same is going to be true with Fleury and it says here that, regardless of what happens with the Penguins for the rest of this season, three or four years from now Fleury will be a better goalie than Murray.

He should start Monday night in Calgary and be the Penguins’ No. 1 goaltender until he proves he’s not.

• There are lot of people in the media who would like you to believe that Connor McDavid playing in Edmonton is bad for the NHL and that it would be better if he were playing in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles.

Not true.

Edmonton is the perfect place for him. He’s about to become hockey’s next great superstar and Edmonton fans deserve him and will appreciate him.

• Did you happen to notice what Bill Belichick did Friday? You remember Bill – the coach who won his fifth Super Bowl a month ago. He traded his first- and third-round picks in next month’s draft to the New Orleans Saints for wide receiver Brandin Cooks and a fourth-round pick.

Cooks was the Saints’ receiving leader last season and will fit right into the Belichick system. He’s 5-10, 189 pounds, can also play some running back and will be a beast in the Patriots’ offense next season. Belichick seems to have a pretty good idea of how to stay in Super Bowl contention. He might already have picked the best player on Day 1 of the 2017 draft.

• Antonio Brown got his big payday, and deservedly so, but let’s not get carried away and call him the slam-dunk best wide receiver in Steelers history. He’s a great player but he’s not only not better than Lynn Swann or John Stallworth, so far, he’s not any better than Louis Lipps.

Lipps is often overlooked in discussions about all time great Steelers receivers. Maybe because he was only great for six years, but he averaged 19 yards a catch four times and he was playing with mediocre quarterbacks.

Brown has already won the battle of numbers among Steelers wide receivers but he’s playing in a much different era. Stallworth, Swann and Lipps all averaged 16 yards per catch for their careers. Brown is at 12.8.

• Robert Griffin III was as good as any rookie quarterback in NFL history in 2012 when he threw for more than 3,000 yards and ran for more than 800. He was released Friday by the worst team in the league, the Cleveland Browns. NFL fans are getting cheated when a coach who can figure out how to benefit from that talent can’t be found.

• Mike Francesca, talk show host at WFAN Radio in New York, took a lot of heat this week for saying this to a caller who asked Francesca if he thought his daughter could ever coach a major men’s pro sports team: “Let’s be honest. Your daughter, maybe she’ll become a great athlete. Maybe she’ll become a great executive. But the problem is, there’s not gonna be an avenue for her to manage a major league men’s team. First of all, do you know how it would be for a female to manage 25 men? Or 50 men? Do you know how impossible that would be? It wouldn’t be tough. It would be impossible. You’re gonna tell me that you think a woman could walk into an NFL team and coach, as a head coach, 15 assistants and 50 to 60 men?”

A reasonable person would take that answer as a no. It’s a common-sense answer. The self-righteous came out of the woodwork to call him a sexist and a chauvinist.

Just more proof that common sense stopped overcoming political correctness a long time ago.

• As you’re cramming for the NFL draft next month and reading all the projections about the top prospects, it might be a good idea to keep in mind that, now that RGIII has been released by the Browns, 21 of the 32 first-round picks in 2012 are either no longer with the teams that drafted them, out of football, or suspended.

John Steigerwald writes a Sunday column for the Observer-Reporter.