WILMINGTON, Mass. — Tim Thomas, the Boston Bruins goalie and the best player at his position in the N.H.L. this season, was taking off his gear in the empty dressing room Friday when he was asked about breaking Dominik Hasek’s record for the highest single-season save percentage.  “What about your quest for .937?”  “I didn’t realize it,” Thomas said. “I’d heard about it earlier this year, but I didn’t know what the exact number was. I’ll now try to forget it as soon as I can,” he added, laughing.  Thomas, 36, is just happy to be here after toiling for years in Finland, Sweden and the North American minor leagues. He does not seem to pay close attention to the numbers he has put up in six full seasons with the Bruins.  Rather, he keeps track of personal milestones. The night before, he stopped 24 shots in a 7-0 shutout of Montreal.  “It’s the 25th of my career,” Thomas said. “I’ll remember it forever.”  But if things continue over the last nine games of the season as they have over the previous 73, Thomas will be forced to look beyond the personal to the fact that his performance will be among the best in history.  Going into Saturday’s matinee against the visiting Rangers, Thomas is at .938, an eyelash better than Hasek’s .937 with the 1998-99 Buffalo Sabres, the best save percentage recorded since the N.H.L. started keeping track of the statistic in 1982-83.  It would fall short of the .942 recorded by Toronto’s 42-year-old Jacques Plante in 1970-71, but that figure, unearthed through forensic work with newspaper summaries by the hockey historian Edward Yuen, is not considered official.  Either way, it is a measure of Thomas’s stature that he is mentioned in the same context as Hasek and Plante. He also stands to make history in other ways.  If Thomas wins the Vezina Trophy as the N.H.L.’s best goalkeeper, he will, at 37, be the oldest to win the award since voting began in 1982.  And if he wins the Hart Trophy as the league’s most valuable player — and where, after all, would the Bruins be if he were not stopping almost 94 percent of the 32.6 shots per game allowed by their porous defense? — he would be the oldest player ever to do so, by two years, over Eddie Shore in 1927 and Herb Gardiner in 1938.  “His numbers are the most incredible — Vezina hands-down,” Thomas’s teammate Mark Recchi said. “It’s not even a question.”  Unlike today’s static goalies, who play mostly on their knees, Thomas leaps and dives, a style recalling Hasek’s, the Czech with a spine like a Slinky. Goaltenders are not taught to play that way anymore.  “When I was in college, I kind of emulated him,” Thomas said. “I wasn’t trying to play like Hasek — my style was already similar — but I saw how he was doing things, and how I could do some things easier.  “He had an influence; so did Patrick Roy, though. He was the one who basically invented this butterfly style that everyone’s playing. I didn’t get my first exposure to that till my first camp after college. So I had to learn everything at a later age.”  Late blooming is a persistent theme for Thomas. He grew up in a family struggling to make ends meet in Flint, Mich.  “We peddled fruit door to door and by the side of the road in the summer,” Thomas said.  He spent four years at the University of Vermont, where one of his teammate was Martin St. Louis; they would become only the second and third Catamounts to make the N.H.L.  But first he bounced around the minor leagues, the Swedish Elitserien and the Finnish SM-liiga. In Finland he won a title, a best goaltender award, and the M.V.P. awards as voted by the league and another by the players.  Finally in 2005-6, Thomas, at 31, won a regular job with the Bruins. He became their starter the next year and soon had established himself as the first consistently league-leading goalie Boston had had since Cecil Thompson in the 1920 and ’30s and Frankie Brimsek, who succeeded Thompson and played for the Bruins until 1949.  Thomas led the league with a .933 save percentage in 2008-9 and gained fame for his practice of yoga; his instructor told The Hockey News that Thomas applied what he learned in yoga to his sport “more than any other athlete I’ve ever worked with.”  Bone chips in his hip hindered Thomas’s performance in 2009-10. After Tuukka Rask, who took over the No. 1 job, led the league in save percentage at .931, there was talk of trading Thomas.  But off-season hip surgery made Thomas pain free for the first time in years, and now he is back atop the league.  Still, memories in Boston are short. A recent slump — Thomas stopped 90 percent of the 40 shots per game he faced in three recent games — prompted Coach Claude Julien to say the No. 1 job was up for grabs.  That was probably why Thomas and Rask were among only five Bruins to show up for the optional practice here Friday morning. Thomas was the only one who had played in the previous night’s shellacking of Montreal.  Away from Boston, the talk is of what could be a record season for Thomas, but in Boston, and especially in the Bruins’ dressing room, the talk is of more immediate topics.  “That’s the way it is,” Thomas said. “The president, Cam Neely, came on the radio a couple days ago saying he wasn’t sure who was playing in the playoffs yet. It’s the big leagues. The pressure’s always on.”  A version of this article appears in print on March 26, 2011, on page D7 of the New York edition with the headline: Goalie Has a Shot at Two Awards and a Record. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Tim Thomas could set a single-season record for save percentage and is in the running for the Hart Trophy and the Vezina Trophy.