The Columbus Blue Jackets, though they’re in better shape than the Habs, have also been struggling with goalie injuries as of late, and knocks to both Elvis Merzlikins and Joonas Korpisalo had them calling up Jean-Francois Berube from the Cleveland Monsters to man the crease. But the man they once called “Hamburglar” up in Ottawa isn’t the only goalie seeing unexpected life after years away from the highest level. Hammond’s success adds, if nothing else, a surprising epilogue to the end of his career, and for Montreal, the wins he’s helped provide are an exciting bright spot in an otherwise horrific season. Then, as fate would have it, he took the ice against his old Senators in Ottawa on Saturday, where he led his brand-new squad to a 2-1 victory-their fifth in a row in a season where, up to this point, they’d failed to manage back-to-back wins. 20, he made 30 saves and stopped two of three shootout attempts for the win. And wouldn’t you know it, his two games between the pipes so far have been some of the best the Canadiens have experienced all season. So the Habs sent a minor-league winger, Brandon Baddock, to the Wild in exchange for one of their minor-league goalies, the 34-year-old Andrew Hammond. And the youngsters Montreal has put in net, Sam Montembeault and Cayden Primeau, have each been well below average. Jake Allen, the middling backup, suffered a long-term injury in January. Their longtime star, Carey Price, hasn’t featured at all due to a combination of injury’s and his entry into the NHL’s player assistance program. It’s been an ugly disaster of a year so far for the last-place Habs, typified by their situation at goalie. Hammond stopped 44 shots in the victory, but gave up five goals to lose Game 6, in what for quite a while seemed to be his final NHL game.īut four years later, yet another desperate team has found themselves turning to Hammond for help: the Montreal Canadiens. If he enjoyed any kind of curtain call, it was when a desperate Colorado Avalanche called upon him to win a do-or-die Game 5 in the first round of the 2018 playoffs, after he made just one start for them all regular season. And though he earned himself a contract extension in the summer, he never regained that incredible rookie magic, going 7-11-4 in 2015-16 and eventually hitting waivers just two years after it all began. From there, he stayed molten hot, going 20-1-2 through the rest of the regular season to help the struggling Sens steal a playoff berth as the seventh seed in the Eastern Conference.Īfter two playoff losses, however, Hammond was pulled for the remainder of the Sens’ first-round defeat. An undrafted goalie out of Bowling Green, he flew under the radar in the Ottawa Senators system for a couple of years until February 2015, when he made 42 saves in his first career NHL start and victory.
It’s a brief tale of sudden success and just-as-sudden decline. The book on Andrew Hammond in the NHL had long since been closed.
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