Written by Josh Tessler
My wife Elizabeth asked me a question the other day that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. She wanted to know if junior teams develop players for the team or for what comes next. It’s a question most casual fans don’t ask, and honestly, most serious fans don’t either. The assumption is that junior hockey exists as a pipeline to the NHL. The reality is a lot more complicated than that, and nowhere is that more apparent than in how goalies are developed and evaluated at the junior level.
Here is the honest truth: goalies are often the last priority in junior hockey. Rosters are built around skaters. Systems are designed around skaters. When a team is in a rebuild, the goalie is frequently the one left holding the bag, facing rushes and odd-man situations that better teams never allow. The numbers that come out of those situations get attached to the goalie’s name and follow him into draft evaluations, and too often scouts and fans take them at face value.
It is also worth understanding the broader context that shapes these numbers. With more players leaving for the NCAA earlier than ever, junior rosters turn over at a faster rate than they used to. That means the development environment for any given goalie can change dramatically from one season to the next, with different defensive partners, different systems, and different levels of protection in front of the crease. For fans trying to evaluate a goalie prospect based on his statistics, this matters enormously. A save percentage that looks alarming in one context might look completely reasonable once you understand what that goalie was working with. Junior statistics for goalies are a starting point for evaluation, not a conclusion. The story behind the numbers is almost always more interesting than the numbers themselves.
The same goes for tendencies that can look like flaws on the surface. When you see an athletic goalie overcommitting on pucks in junior play, it is worth asking why before writing him off. Sometimes that overcommitment is not a technique problem. It is a survival instinct. When a goalie is consistently the last line of defense with no structural support in front of him, he is going to do whatever it takes to stop the puck. That athleticism being pushed to its limit is not a red flag. In many cases it is exactly what you want to see. The question is whether those tendencies hold up once the team context improves, and more often than not, they do.
Jack Ivankovic is a perfect example. I loved him in his draft year. Took him for Team Tessler with the Boston Bruins picks and I’d do it again. His numbers in Brampton that year, a 3.05 GAA and a .903 save percentage, look underwhelming on paper. Watch the tape and you’ll understand why they are what they are. The defense in front of him left him exposed consistently. There were rush situations where he was genuinely the last line of defense with no support whatsoever, forced to rely on pure athleticism to bail out a breakdown that never should have happened. Put him in a structured environment with NHL-caliber systems around him and you see a completely different goalie. Team Canada showed that. His university play showed that.
That context is not an excuse. It is the whole story.
The same logic applies to Carter Casey in this year’s class. His save percentage is going to raise eyebrows on a lot of boards. Medicine Hat played a high-event, up-tempo style all season that put Casey under sustained fire in a way most goalies in this class never experienced. Strip out the team context and what you have is a genuinely athletic goaltender who competes hard and has real tools to work with. He is further down on boards partly because of what the numbers say and partly because of his size. He belongs in the conversation.
Which brings me to what I actually believe about evaluating goalies at this stage of development.
I want to be clear about what I value in a goalie prospect. Positioning matters. Being squared up to the shooter matters. Post protection matters. These are the technical foundations of the position and they are not negotiable at the next level. A goalie who cannot get set, cannot seal his posts, and cannot square up consistently is going to have a very short professional career regardless of how athletic he is. Those things are real and they matter.
But athleticism is the trait that too often gets overlooked, and I think that is a mistake. You cannot teach size and you cannot teach athleticism, and in the modern NHL, which is faster than it has ever been, athleticism is what keeps goalies in the play when everything breaks down around them. Technical refinement is coachable. Positioning is coachable. The ability to move, react, and recover in an instant is not something you install later. It is either there or it is not. When I am evaluating a goalie prospect, I want to see the technical foundation and I want to see the athleticism underneath it. Both matter. But if I have to choose between a technically sound goalie with limited athleticism and an athletic goalie whose technique needs work, I am taking the athlete every time and betting on the coaching to close the gap.
That said, I want to be clear about something. There are outstanding goalie coaches at the junior level who are putting in serious work with their goaltenders every single day. The development happening behind the scenes in a lot of organizations is real and it matters. This is not an indictment of the people doing that work. The issue is systemic and not every organization prioritizes it equally. Even the best goalie coach in the world can only do so much when the team structure and defensive system are leaving the goalie exposed night after night. The gap between organizations that get it right and organizations that do not is significant, and that gap shows up in the numbers in ways that are easy to misread if you are not paying attention to the context behind them.
The goalies I want to bet on at the draft level are the ones who can move, who compete on every shot regardless of game situation, and who show the athletic tools to handle a pace of play that gets faster every year. I want to know what they do when their team fails them, because in junior hockey that happens more than anyone wants to admit.
Better goalie development starts with teams taking it seriously as a priority across the board, with dedicated goalie coaching, structured systems that protect the crease, and honest evaluation that separates individual performance from team context. Until that becomes the norm, the numbers are going to keep misleading people and genuinely talented goalies are going to keep falling further than they should.
Our approach in the Smaht Scouting 2026 NHL Draft Guide was to look past the save percentages and ask what the goalie was actually working with. If you want to see how that thinking translated into our evaluations, the guide is available now for purchase.