Cycle Like The Sedins has had a good couple of posts recently on goalie tandems in the league. James likens the trend to what he's seen in football with running backs sharing the load:

The 2008-09 season might just usher in the two goalie era in hockey. It's certainly been a rough year for the household name, huge GP goalies. Both Martin Brodeur and Roberto Luongo suffered from possible wear-and-tear related injuries and missed serious time. The Dallas Stars nearly prepared for its first lottery ball in ages during Marty Turco's horrifying start to the season and must have missed Mike Smith's quality relief appearances. Even guys such as Ryan Miller and Henrik Lundqvist face up-and-down periods.

It's tough to know if this is going to be a long-term phenomenon, but there certainly have been more successful tandems lately than what we saw prelockout. The Red Wings have gone with some sort of a two-man system four out of the past five years, and when you win a Cup with a particular strategy that involves some savings under the salary cap, it's no surprise that some teams follow suit.

Detroit GM Ken Holland made no bones about the fact he was putting his money into the blueline and up front instead of the crease last spring during their championship run:

"My feeling is if you can get one of the five or six best goalies in the league you can spend the money," Holland said. "We can’t get into those guys, and the difference between the eighth goalie in the league and the 15th goalie, it’s a big difference in money. It’s not a big difference in performance.

By my count, only nine goaltenders will get to 60 starts this season, and many of the better teams in the league have had a lot of success with two netminders sharing the role. Only two of the eight teams on pace for 100 points – San Jose and Calgary – are leaning that heavily on one goalie, and the Bruins lead the NHL in points while employing a tandem of Tim Thomas and Manny Fernandez. Both are among the league leaders in goals-against average and save percentage.

Thomas recently had some great comments on a league conference call when he said that he feels that pairing up is the future of the position:

"Yeah, you know, goalies – it's a human body. I think that's the plan is for it to pay off towards the playoffs.

"I personally am I believer that you cannot play 65 or 70 games and be at 100% in the playoffs, or at least for a long run in the playoffs. That's just my opinion. If you look at history, Cam Ward, the year that they won the Cup, (Martin) Gerber played the majority of the games that year. So Cam Ward was fresh going into the playoffs. Kiprusoff, when he made his run in Calgary, he spent most of the year, first half of the year on the bench in San Jose, so he had not played a lot of games.

"Obviously you can look at other stats, and Marty Brodeur has been able to excel with the long runs. So it's not a set rule. But last year, Osgood only played half the games before going into the playoffs. So there's an argument to be made that keeping your goalie fresh will pay off in the long run.

"I think with the new NHL, I think each game takes more energy than it used to compared to the old NHL, just because of the style of play. So in my personal opinion, I think the days of goalies playing 70 games should be over."

Thomas is a great interview, by the way – thoughtful like a lot of goalies. That's quite an answer to the brief question he was asked about splitting time with Fernandez this season.

Given he went the college route, it really wasn't until he was 30 that Thomas even had a 50-game regular season, and that came as a starter in Finland during the lockout. The low point in his time in the Bruins organization was actually two years back when he played 66 games.

I brought this up when I wrote about the Vezina Trophy recently, but there's been a bit of an understanding over time that netminders have to play a minimum number of game to qualify for that award. I wonder now if that changes as more and more of the NHL's truly top goalies split time with their backups.

The other question here is how tandems affect life under the salary cap. If splitting goalies' time in goal truly results in smaller contracts for backstops a la the Red Wings, you better believe we'll be seeing more of it.

We'll have to see how Boston fares in the playoffs.

Photo: Wes Cunningham