The NHL Goalie Battles That Will Decide Fantasy Drafts in an Eight-Day Camp

The NHL's preseason is 65 games across eight days this year, running September 19 through September 26 before the regular season opens on September 29. It is the first season under the reduced format that came with the new collective bargaining agreement, and it has created a problem that lands hardest on one position: goaltending.

Coaching staffs have roughly a week to settle their creases. In fantasy terms, that means the goalie questions you are drafting around may not have answers before your draft, and the answers that do arrive will be decided on very small samples.

Why goalie battles matter more than any other roster question

Goaltending is the highest-variance position in fantasy hockey and the one where role certainty is worth the most. A goalie who starts 50 games is a top-ten asset. The same goalie splitting a crease 30-30 is barely rosterable. There is no other position where the gap between the two outcomes is that large, and there is no other position where the outcome is so dependent on a coaching decision rather than on the player's own production.

That is why a compressed camp is a goaltending problem specifically. A winger competing for a third-line spot who does not win it still plays somewhere. A goalie who does not win the crease is nearly worthless.

Where the jobs are actually open

**New Jersey.** The Devils made changes after last season did not go as planned in the crease, and Jake Allen is expected to assume starting duties. The more interesting question for deep leagues is the backup competition between Nico Daws, 25, and Dave Rittich, 34. That matters because Allen's age and workload history make a genuine timeshare plausible rather than theoretical, and the backup who wins that job may end up with more starts than a backup usually gets.

**Montreal.** Samuel Montembeault enters camp motivated by circumstance as much as competition, with a new contract to negotiate next summer. Contract years are one of the more reliable soft signals in fantasy hockey, not because players try harder, but because teams and players both have incentives to maximize visible workload. Montembeault is the kind of mid-round goalie whose start count could exceed projections.

**Winnipeg.** The Jets opened their preseason with Thomas Milic in net against Edmonton, with Connor Hellebuyck remaining away from the team. That is an unusual situation that has created immediate opportunity for young goaltenders in Winnipeg's camp, and it is the single most consequential unresolved crease in the league for fantasy purposes given what a full Hellebuyck season is worth.

Daily Faceoff's preseason survey also flags Buffalo, San Jose, Tampa Bay, the Islanders and Edmonton as creases worth watching, several of which involve teams bringing in new goaltenders or trying to establish a young netminder as a full-time NHL starter.

The compressed camp makes incumbents safer

The structural read on an eight-day preseason is that it favors the status quo. When a coaching staff has three weeks, a challenger can string together performances and force a decision. When it has eight days and 65 league-wide games to distribute, most starters get two appearances and most challengers get one.

That is not enough information to overturn a depth chart. Teams will default to what they believed entering camp, which means the goalie who was penciled in as the starter in August is more likely to be the starter in October than in a normal year.

For drafters, that has a clear implication: pay for certainty, and discount upside. The speculative backup who might win a job is a worse bet this season than he would normally be, and the established starter with a slightly worse save percentage is a better one.

The Verdexed model take

Our framework for valuing goaltenders separates three inputs that most drafters collapse into one: expected starts, team quality, and individual save performance.

Expected starts is the most predictable and the most valuable. Team quality is moderately predictable and drives wins, which is a category in most formats. Individual save performance above or below expected is the least predictable input year over year, and it is the one that most rankings lean on hardest because it is the one that shows up in last season's numbers.

That ordering is the edge. A goalie coming off a strong save percentage on a bad team in an unsettled crease is the most overvalued profile in fantasy hockey. A goalie coming off a mediocre save percentage on a good team with a locked-in workload is the most undervalued.

Applied to this season specifically, the compressed camp amplifies the value of the expected-starts input, because the teams that have already decided are more likely to stick with the decision. Draft the settled crease on the good team. Let someone else take the lottery ticket.

There is one more wrinkle worth pricing. The 84-game schedule adds two starts' worth of opportunity across the league, and the elimination of the Olympic break removes a stretch where starters historically got unscheduled rest. Workhorse goalies should see slightly more starts than their career rates suggest, which widens the gap between the true starters and the timeshare goalies even further.

What to do in your draft

Take one goalie you are confident about earlier than the consensus says, then wait. The middle of the goalie market is the worst value in fantasy hockey, because it is full of players whose start counts are genuinely uncertain and whose prices assume the good outcome.

Avoid drafting both sides of a timeshare hoping to cover it. That ties up two roster spots to produce one goalie's worth of counting stats, and the roster flexibility you give up costs more than the certainty is worth.

Monitor the Winnipeg situation closely. It is the highest-leverage unresolved question in the league right now, and its resolution moves multiple players' values at once.

And check the confirmed starters daily once the season begins. Daily Faceoff publishes confirmed and projected starters, and in a season with tighter margins and more games, the managers who set lineups off confirmed starters rather than off assumptions will win the streaming categories by a wide margin.