It’s hard to overstate what Saros did for the Predators during a season in which he was nominated for the Vezina Trophy and played more games (67) than any other guy at his position. But his value to the team was demonstrated in the worst possible way during the playoffs as, with Saros sidelined by a leg injury sustained in the season’s 11^th hour, Nashville was lit up and swept aside in four games by the top-seeded Colorado Avalanche. Meanwhile, the Dallas Stars — who, like Nashville, grabbed one of two wild card berths in the West — very nearly pulled off an upset of the Calgary Flames for one reason: Jake Oettinger.

Goaltending, it turns out, continues to be a make-or-break element of hockey. And yet, teams are usually reluctant to spend premier draft capital on the young men who play the sport’s most important position. Not one of the three nominees for this year’s Vezina was taken in the first round; in fact, you’ll find two fourth-rounders — Saros and winner Igor Shesterkin — and second-rounder Jakob Markstrom. By contrast, glance over the bios of the skaters who were up for other major awards — the Hart, Ted Lindsay, Norris, Calder and Selke — and you’ll discover at least two of the three candidates for each piece of hardware were taken no lower than ninth overall. While it’s been years since we’ve seen a goalie crack the top-10, the trend of laying off tenders until your third or fourth pick might be changing. And if Saros’s success playing at five-foot-11 means anything, maybe teams will re-consider how wide a net they cast in search of a goalie.

The Predators did, of course, snagging their now-franchise goalie 99^th overall. Saros was the ninth goalie taken in 2013, a year in which no goalie was taken in the first round. That’s not surprising given the dominant ideology of the day. Goalie prospects had their moment in the sun when masked men were among the top six players selected in a given draft on seven occasions from 1997 through 2005. That basically gets you from Roberto Luongo (fourth overall in ’97) to Carey Price (fifth in 2005). In the 16 drafts we’ve had since Montreal took Price, no goalie has gone higher than 11^th overall and 19 of the 30 teams that have been in the league for that entire span have never used a first-rounder on a goalie. Just seven of the 57 goalies who played at least 15 games this season were first-rounders.

Reasons for the trepidation fall on a spectrum ranging from somewhat understandable to perplexing. Goaltending has long held a mystique as a vocation for quirky, unknowable types. And, for a long time, few people from NHL front offices were making much of an effort to understand goalies any better. “It used to be the most poorly scouted position in all of sports,” says Mark Seidel, who has decades worth of scouting experience and now runs the independent service North American Central Scouting.

The size bias has become a very real thing in the past 10 to 15 years and it’s also commonly understood that goalies take longer to develop than forwards and defencemen, leaving general managers to question whether selecting an 18-year-old goalie who might not have a positive impact on his team for five years is the best career move. “Everybody says goaltenders take longer to develop,” says longtime NHL goalie coach and scout Pierre Groulx. “I agree, but I think teams can do a better job by knowing what they’re drafting and [how] to help the goalie right off the bat as soon as he’s drafted.”

Both Seidel and Groulx cite the rise of analytics — what else — as a source of particular illumination when evaluating the most static position on a 200-by-85-foot sheet of ice. Where once teams may have had a scout with no personal history at the position basically glancing at some crude stats and asking themselves “Does he look like a goalie?” now — at the very least — teams get the goalie coach involved and more and more are putting together small goalie departments with three or four people crushing video and getting in-person viewings. “I think, like a lot of things, scouting has evolved and gotten better over the years,” Kealty says. “These days there are more and more goalie-specific people from different organizations who are evaluating these guys. It’s a hand-in-hand situation. In the last few years [goalie-specific evaluators] have gotten more involved, but your [traditional] scouts are still seeing all the guys. I think that gives people a little bit more confidence when you make these high picks.”

Indeed, there seems to have been at least a slight shift in recent years when it comes to stepping up and taking a goalie with a first-round pick. From 2007 to 2018, the only time a club picked a goalie with one of the top 17 selections was the Dallas Stars grabbing Jack Campbell 11^th overall in 2011. Each of the past three drafts, however, have seen a goalie go in the top 15 with Nashville snagging Yaroslav Askarov 11^th in 2019, Florida drafting Spencer Knight 13^th in 2020 and Detroit using pick No. 15 to take Sebastian Cossa in 2021.

Kealty acknowledges that, in addition to the scouting becoming more refined, it’s also likely no coincidence that the best goalie on the planet for some time has been Tampa’s Andrei Vasilevskiy, a 19^th-overall pick in 2012. Five years later, Dallas took Oettinger 26^th overall and the entire hockey world just saw him nearly win a playoff series on his own. Finding a player capable of that kind of impact can mean the world for a franchise, which is why Seidel has always been a little miffed by the hesitancy to take goalies high. He points out that National Football League teams, year after year, find reasons to talk themselves into drafting a quarterback sooner rather than later because, if you hit on that position, you’re probably a playoff squad for a decade to come. The same can basically be said of a franchise goalie, yet teams shy away. At least, they have for a long time. “Any player you draft, it’s based on projection,” says Kealty. “And if you really believe in the player — no matter what the position is — you’re going to take him high if you see his upside as that high. And if you hit on it at the goaltending position? Well, then you’re in pretty good shape.”

Outhouse — who played nine games in the ECHL and five more in the American Hockey League during the 2019-20 campaign — is now 24 years old and spent this past winter with the University of New Brunswick Reds. In the NHL, meanwhile, Saros recorded his Vezina-calibre season while being just one of two stoppers — along with veteran Slovak Jaroslav Halak — to play at least 10 games and be listed at five-foot-11 or shorter. In 2003-04, the last year of the Dead Puck Era, 14 goalies fit that criteria. In the 2008 and 2009 playoffs, five-foot-11 Chris Osgood played 42 contests, won the Cup once and played in another Final while posting a league-best .928 save percentage over those two post-seasons. In 2011, Boston’s Tim Thomas became the last sub-six-foot goalie to lead a team to a title, besting Roloson 1-0 in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Final, then outdueling six-foot-three Roberto Luongo in the showcase series en route to winning playoff MVP honours. But for much of the past decade, NHL executives have been channeling the energy of Charles Wang, the now-deceased former Islanders owner who — never one to think inside the box — openly mused about the possibility of trying to convert sumo wrestlers to goalies. “A lot of these GMs are going that way,” says Roloson, who’s convinced a lot of quality tenders are being overlooked. “But we laughed about it when Charles said it.”

If the logic of stalking large stoppers is basic — bigger body covers more net — the rub is that style accounts for a lot in the crease and size does not tell the whole story, especially as skaters have become so adept at making goalies move with east-west one-timer plays. “You can still have six-foot-six goalies who play like they’re five-foot-five,” Groulx says. “And you can have goalies like Juuse Saros who are small, but play bigger than what they are.”

As it happens, the 2022 goalies are not regarded as a strong draft class. Still, if someone like Vasilevskiy or Oettinger can inspire teams in a copycat league to spend first-rounders on goalies, can Saros’s achievements — or even the promise shown by average-sized Buffalo Sabres prospect Devon Levi — convince a club to step up and put some faith in undersized hopefuls like Brett Brochu of the London Knights or Hugo Havelid, who led Sweden to gold at the U-18 World Championship in May? Maybe it’s time to be less rigid about the Platonic ideal of a goalie, not only because the position is so important but also because, with each passing year, teams rely more and more on both members of a battery to get them through an offence-happy regular season. “The game is so quick now and the players are so talented that the game is mentally tougher for goalies because it comes at them so quick,” Groulx says. “It’s not necessarily the physical aspect of the game that’s tough for goalies, it’s the mental aspect.”

Saros — who says size questions never irked him — has always had the between-the-ears aspect of the game down, to say nothing of his strong positioning and absurd quickness. Kealty doesn’t deny there’s a certain frame scouts prefer at any position — teams want six-foot-three centres or defencemen too, if they can get them — but ultimately, as was the case with Saros, a prospect just has to have enough of the other “it” factors to entice you. “There are guys who have success who are cut from these different moulds and that’s the job of scouting, to find the intangibles and to see through all of it and still take chances,” Kealty says. “In this case, it’s worked out very well for everybody.”

Who wants to be able to say that next?