Quick Hit: Who's the best goalie in the league? Quick or Lundqvist?

      

            The NHL has changed over the last 20 years dramatically.With goalies improving in skill each year it's harder and harder to determine who's the best. It seems every year multiple goalies step out of the shadows and climb right to the top of the heap of top goalie. Just this year alone we seen Jonathan Quick flourish late in the season to cement himself as 2012 best. Notable others are Washington Capitals, Michal Neuvirth- a flash in the pan or future star? Another goalie who really figured it out was Phoenix Coyotes,Mike Smith.At the beginning of the 2011-2012 Smith was thought to be a decent goal very respectable numbers but someone who never broke through to be a star, well that has change. With an incredible post season Smith has become a goalie any team would love to have.

           So with that being said who's the best goalie? It's hard to say really, a goalie that's hot one year my not do so well next year. Then there are goalies that just seem to play great no matter what team is in front of them or how old they are. Here are the two goalies I think are top two in the league. I'll let you decide who's the best.

         Johnathan Quick- Alright it's a no brainier, we all watched the playoffs this year and it was almost impossible to ignore Quick, he was outstanding for the L.A Kings. Quick posted a 35-25-13 record in the regular season with a 1.95 GAA second to only Brian Elliot of the St.Louis Blues. Quick than went on to have a legendary post season carrying the 8th seeded Kings to the Stanley Cup. Topping his regular season stats Quick managed a 16-4 record along with a 1.41 GAA.Can Quick live up to these numbers next year? I think so he is young and still awaiting his prime.

       Hendrik Lundqvist- The next goalie in my top 3 has to be Hendrik Lundqvist , I choose Lundqvist not only cause he's a tremendous talent but he is also crazy consistent. He has never posted less than 30 wins in a season while playing for the Rangers and arguably his worst season he put up a 35-27-14 record...not too shabby.At the age of 30 Lundqvist seems to not be slowing down one bit. 

      

           So, did i get it right or wrong? Do these two deserve to be at the top or is there another goalie that should be the king of the mountain let me know in the comment section.

       

What's new to NHL 13

      It's almost that time of year again, Ea sports is set to release it's latest edition,NHL 13. Well we still got a little less than 3 weeks to go. But in the mean time we are given the NHL 13 demo to pass the time and drool over the newest features and modes for this year.I got the opportunity to play the demo briefly today and overall I was pleased. Here's what I found.

       New realistic skating- Probably the most noticeable new gameplay feature is the skating. EA has developed a more realistic way to skate which for me is great. In previous years it was hard to get breakaways and odd man rushes because the defencemen could always skate the same speed both forwards and backwards but not this year. Players now will stop and take a second to turn their body and start skating in the opposite direction starting from a near stop. This is great fun if you have a fast player like Phil Kessel and you can catch a defenseman flat footed. Good on EA for finally fixing this problem.

      New modes- The two new modes that appear in the demo are NHL live moments and GM connected mode. I'll start with the NHL live moments mode, I think this is a fun mode for when you don't want to play a full game. In this mode your job is to recreate history. The demo has only one objective and that is to recreate game 5 of the 2012 western conference finals, more specifically the end of that game. Your goal is to score in overtime as the L.A Kings eliminating the Phoenix Coyotes .I can't wait to see what else we can recreate!The next new mode is gm connected. This feature allows you to be the gm of your favourite team just as be a gm mode but the twist is instead of trading with a computer you can now trade with up to 29 of your friends. You can play full seasons against friends all while calling the shots. I personally can't wait for this mode, it's the ultimate fantasy league!
      
      New rating system- NHL 13 has also come up with a new player rating system. Now I only got to examine two teams (Kings and Devils) and I found the ratings to be pretty bad, Martin Brodeur for one is only rated at 82, I know he's old and at the end of his career but come on he is one of the best goalies of all time and he did help his team get to the Stanley cup finals. I think they could have done a little better. There are more examples of bad ratings but I'll let you examine them for yourself. ( check out Sykoras rating,69 ouch)

       What is not so new- Now with all the new modes we can expect lots of things to be the same as last year. I found that the faceoffs and the hitting were the same as last year as well as in between faceoffs all those graphics are basically the same. I really haven't played to much to find more similarities but I'm sure there's a bunch and that's fine as long as EA steadily improves each year and this year...they have.