It is that time of year when hockey fans are thinking about the looming NHL playoffs and wondering if their team’s goaltending is good enough. They know it is inevitable that, at some point, a key game will be determined by the netminder. The key save will be the difference.
But the approach to the goaltending position appears to be changing. After a long stretch of Stanley Cup-champion goalies drafted and developed by their teams — from the Los Angeles Kings’ Jonathan Quick to Tampa Bay’s Andrei Vasilevskiy, the Colorado Avalanche may have changed the thinking of teams last season.
The 2022 champions featured trade acquisition Darcy Kuemper, with free-agent signing Pavel Francouz providing support. And after winning the Cup, Kuemper was allowed to walk away in free agency to the Washington Capitals, replaced by Alexandar Georgiev, a cheaper option, in a summer trade with the New York Rangers.
It seems to be increasingly difficult to draft and develop a goaltender to match a team’s arc, partly because of the physical demands of the position. There are fewer No. 1 goaltenders capable of playing 60-plus games — only Winnipeg’s Connor Hellebuyck (61) and Nashville’s Juuse Saros (60) have hit that mark this season — and more teams are embracing the two-goaltender system.
There may have been as few as 12 teams in the 32-team league who entered the season knowing, health provided, who their main goaltender was. Of those 12, only Boston (Linus Ullmark), Tampa Bay (Vasilevskiy), Dallas (Jake Oettinger) and the New York Rangers (Igor Shesterkin) had secured playoff spots heading into the final week.
Coupled with the lack of stalwarts at the sport’s most critical position is a growing trend for teams to simply go out and find a goalie when the time is right to contend. Only three of the top 10 teams in the NHL right now have drafted and developed their top guy: the Rangers, the Stars and the Edmonton Oilers (Stuart Skinner). It’s simply easier and more efficient to steal someone else’s guy.
The Maple Leafs changed their top two goalies last summer, bringing in a health-challenged Matt Murray by trade and a former first-round pick in Ilya Samsonov via free agency. Murray’s recent injury — his third this year — may bring rookie Joseph Woll into the picture and shine light on Samsonov’s limited eight games of playoff experience.
Carolina opted for the two-goalie system last season, bringing in Frederik Andersen and Antti Raanta. The Hurricanes have tripled the fun this year with 23-year-old Pyotr Kochetkov, who many think will be the main guy come playoff time. They drafted him in the second round in 2019 but he hasn’t yet emerged as a game-eating No. 1, with 27 NHL appearances, 24 this season.
New Jersey acquired its starter, Vitek Vanecek, by trade last summer and he has delivered a stellar campaign — 32 wins in 51 games — that has enabled the upstart Devils to hover at the top of the Metropolitan Division all season. Minnesota dealt for Filip Gustavsson in the summer, too, and the 24-year-old has partnered nicely with veteran Marc-André Fleury, playing 36 games, to make the Wild perhaps the biggest surprise out west. Joonas Korpisalo moved from Columbus to Los Angeles at the trade deadline and has been a nice fit, with five wins in nine appearances.
But the best goaltending story has been in Boston. Ullmark was a 27-year-old free agent who had toiled in Buffalo for six unspectacular years, never playing more than 37 games, when Boston inked him to a four-year deal two summers ago. He has been brilliant this season, leading the NHL with 38 wins, a 1.90 goals-against average and a .937 save percentage in 47 games through Friday. The goaltender the Bruins drafted and developed, Jeremy Swayman, has thrived as his backup and the Bruins entered Saturday one win from tying the league record of 62 in a season.
As the season dwindles down, the anticipation for the first round of the playoffs is building. Goaltending will becritical — it always is. Teams will need their goalie making the big save went it counts. As Ullmark has shown, it won’t matter in the least how he arrived there.
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