Goaltending outlook rankings, part 3 - the Top 10

We’ve made it the third and final part of our attempt to answer one question for each of the 32 NHL team: How good should they feel about their goaltending, both for right now and looking into the future?

Part one covered the bottom 10, and you can find it here. Yesterday, we went through the mushy middle, and that post is here. Today, it’s the top 10.

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Goaltending outlook rankings, part 2 - the mushy middle

Welcome back to our attempt to rank the goaltending outlook of all 32 NHL teams. The basic question we’re trying to answer: How good should each team feel about their goaltending, both for right now and looking into the future?

Yesterday, we introduced the project and counted down the bottom ten. Today, we’re counting down the mushy middle on our way to tomorrow’s Top 10.

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Goaltending outlook rankings, part 1 - the Bottom 10

So you want to talk about the future of NHL goaltending? Good luck.

No really, good luck. You’ll need it. Predicting what will happen with NHL goaltenders in the next game is tough enough, let along looking years down the line. As just one example, have a look back at how NHL GMs ranked the league’s goaltending tiers just three years ago, when Darcy Kuemper was better than Igor Shesterkin, and Jusse Saros and Linus Ullmark couldn’t even crank the top 20 because they were trailing behind Elvis Merzlikins and MacKenzie Blackwood. Over half the players on that list aren’t even starters anymore. A lot can change in the crease, and quickly.

So sure, somewhere out there, right now, a goalie you’ve barely heard of is getting ready to have an out-of-nowhere star turn that will earn him Vezina votes, while somewhere else, a highly paid star we all consider a sure thing is about to face plant and take his team’s season with them. You just can’t predict this stuff with any certainty.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t try. And it doesn’t mean that you can’t put together a snapshot of where the league stands right now. That’s what three of us have set out to do, with a summer project that looks to rank each team’s goaltending outlook.

The basic question here: How good should each team feel about their goaltending situation, both for right now and peering into the future?

Here’s how this will work. We’ve given each of the 32 teams a ranking in three categories:

Current goaltending: How good is their goaltending at the NHL level right now? How good does it project to be in the near-term, which we define as the next three years? This section includes the two goalies who are expected to start the 2024-25 season, as well as anyone else in the system who can be projected to play games. The Athletic’s goaltending expert, Jesse Granger, handled this section.

Future prospects: This section ranks each team’s goaltenders in the system who’ve yet to establish themselves as full-time NHLers, with a focus on ceiling and upside. Prospect guru Scott Wheeler weighs in here.

Note that in theory, there can be some overlap between the first two sections. Yaroslav Askarov is a prospect, but will almost certainly spend meaningful time in the NHL over the next three years. Jake Oettinger is the Stars’ starter now, and at just 25 years old he’s also their future. That’s OK, because Jesse and Scott are looking at those players from two different perspectives: How good they are now (Jesse), and how good they can be and for how long at their eventual peak (Scott).

Cap and contracts: Who makes what, and for how many years? Ideally, a team will have the security of having their good goaltenders locked in at a reasonable price and term. In a hard cap league, a good player making too much for too long may be a negative asset, so contracts matter. There’s going to be some guesswork here, as some key players need new deals. For example, Igor Shesterkin hasn’t signed an extension with the Rangers yet, but that doesn’t mean we just assume that he walks as a UFA in 2025. The key is that this section is about getting value from good players for as long as possible, not simply having the lowest cap hit you can. Sean McIndoe handles this section, with cap info from Puckpedia.

For each category, teams were ranked from 1 to 32. Those scores were then weighted, with Current getting a 1.0 weight, while Future was given 0.75 to recognize the difficulty in peering too far into the future. Cap was weighted at 0.5; it’s important, but history shows us that there are ways to wiggle out of bad deals, although it may be painful.

This will be a three-part series. Today: The bottom ten.

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What was the best team in NHL history without a single Hall-of-Fame player?

Today’s time-waster is a simple one: What’s the best team in history that didn’t have a single Hall-of-Fame player on the roster?

A few of you have sent in variations of the question over the years, and it’s a good one. Nice and easy. I’m not even sure we need the traditional bullet-point ground rules.

We’ll do this by decade, more or less, going back to the first expansion. For more recent teams, we’ll obviously have to use some judgment and common sense over who might make the Hall some day. The 2017-18 Capitals don’t have a single Hall-of-Famer right now, but I have a feeling that Ovechkin guy might get in eventually, so we won’t count them. That challenge will get easier as we work back, but never completely go away, since the committee sometimes drops a decades-old selection on us, seemingly out of nowhere. But we’ll do our best, and maybe check in old pal Paul Pidutti and his Adjusted Hockey model for a sanity check when we need it.

With that in mind, let’s give this a shot. We’ll start in the 2010s and work our way back.

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Welcome to slow news summer, let's play a time-wasting roster-building game

It’s mid-July. All the best free agents have signed, all the trade talk has cooled off, the draft is in the rearview mirror, and nothing is happening. Half the hockey world has already taken off to a cottage or golf course, cell phones turned off. Welcome to the dog days of summer.

Or, as we call them around here, pretty much the best time of the year.

Yeah, it’s time to get weird. This is the time of year when my boss is on vacation and there’s no hockey news to get in the way of me torpedoing your productivity with random trivia and time-wasters.

It’s not for everyone. If you’re looking for in-depth analysis of line rushes from prospect camp, I can’t help you. And if you’re the sort of person who likes to stomp off to the comment section to grumble “Slow news day?”, let me answer you in advance: No, dummy, more like slow news month, consider having some fun with the whole sports fan thing for once in your life.

See? I just called some of my readers dummy. You can’t get away with that stuff in February when people are paying attention. Hockey summers are the best.

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