Goaltending is voodoo. It’s a popular joke in hockey circles, acknowledging that it is still extremely difficult to fill the most important role on the roster because netminders can be a mysterious lot.
Some goalies can be the best in the world one year, only to lose their starting job altogether the next. Some peak early. Some peak late. But the fact of the matter is, you always need good goaltending. In the past decade, there has been a quiet revolution in scouting, where NHL teams began hiring goalie-specific scouts to analyze the position better.
When Chicago Blackhawks goalie scout Dan Ellis joined the team eight years ago, he only knew a handful of other franchises with such a scout on their roster. Now, pretty much every NHL team has one.
“One of the biggest things I heard from scouts when I first started was, ‘Yeah, we don’t get it. We don’t understand the position,’ ” Ellis said. “Most scouts like goalies who put up numbers, ‘Hey, if he stops the puck, that’s all I care about.’ But are you putting up good numbers because your team is protecting you, and they’re scoring six goals and only surrendering 12 shots? Or are you in a bad environment, but you’re overachieving and stealing games?”
While most talent hawks have a region they cover for their team – the OHL or Finland, for example – goalie scouts zero in on players from around the world and often cover both amateurs and pros. It’s a daunting bit of travel, but preparation helps.
Ellis starts each season with a list of 50 to 60 goaltenders, aided by early international tournaments, junior drafts from previous years, Central Scouting’s watch list and his own research. As the year goes on, he refines that list and makes recommendations to Chicago’s head scout for viewings. Luckily for the Hawks, director of amateur scouting Mike Doneghey happened to be a stopper himself back in the day, suiting up in the NCAA for Merrimack College.
Ellis, who played more than 200 NHL games, was drafted 60th overall by Dallas in 2000. There were no goalie-specific scouts back then, but the Stars’ director of amateur scouting at the time was Tim Bernhardt, a former NHL netminder with Calgary and Toronto. There are obvious advantages there, but you don’t have to be born into the position to know goalies.
Utah GM Bill Armstrong made his name as a scout with the St. Louis Blues, a franchise that had a great run of goalie picks when he was director of amateur scouting. During that period, the Blues selected Jordan Binnington, Ville Husso and Joel Hofer, and Armstrong was on staff when they picked Ben Bishop and Jake Allen before that.
During his playing days, Armstrong was an intimidating defenseman, so early on in his scouting career, he attended a summer goaltending school run by Brian Daccord, a former Bruins goalie coach now working for Boston University (he’s also the father of Seattle Kraken goalie Joey Daccord).
“It helped my scouting because I wasn’t afraid to get in there and watch goaltenders and figure them out,” Armstrong said. “I believe it’s up to your scouts to point the (goalie) specialists in the right direction, but I think every scout is certainly responsible to identify goaltenders in their area. There’s no free pass.”
It’s also not as easy to get viewings on netminders compared to forwards or defensemen.
“You don’t even know if he’s playing that night,” Armstrong said. “Some of the viewings you get are flukes where you show up to the rink and the other guy is sick. Then a kid blows you out of the water and you say, ‘Wow, we need to come back and see this guy again.’ It’s definitely a long road scouting goaltenders. There’s a lot of effort and a little bit of luck.”
Speaking of long roads, that’s an important distinction with goaltenders. They’re not jumping straight to the NHL like a Connor McDavid or Macklin Celebrini – it typically takes years for them to make an impact.
“You look at a guy like Joshua Ravensbergen,” Ellis said. “He’s going in the first round, but he could take five to seven years to develop. We look at Drew Commesso, a second-round pick (in the 2020 draft for Chicago) who played for the world-junior team and U.S. Olympic team. He’s a second-year pro, and he just truly started to pop and figure it out with 14 games remaining in the season before making a nice little run in the playoffs. They take time. It’s technical things. It’s tactical things. It’s handling adversity.
“You want to make sure they’re hard workers and they have drive. On the mental side, how do you handle slumps? What do you do to get out of them? Do you have a plan? A lot of these kids have never worked with a mental coach before, and they’re getting drafted into the highest league in the world.”
As one NHL exec noted, it’s also important for goalie-specific scouts to pass on their analysis of a prospect’s style. Sure, they might use the butterfly to great effect in junior, but are they tall enough to make it work in the NHL, or would they be better suited to a more hybrid stance?
“It’s such a technical position,” he said. “It’s important to have a base on what style the goalie is and what’s expected within that structure.”
And size is an important trait, especially these days when shooters are so good at picking top corners. An official NHL puck is one-inch thick, so a goalie shorter than 6-foot-1 has a significant structural disadvantage compared to his peers who are 6-foot-3 or taller.
“How many NHL goalies are six-foot?” Ellis said. “You have to be elite with your mind and your feet. Some of these guys are great in junior, but it doesn’t translate to the NHL level.”
Goalie scouts can’t take on all the responsibility of ranking netminders, according to the exec.
“Your scouts, at the end of the day, still have to know how to evaluate a goalie because they’re more likely to be building a list,” he said. “So, how does that goalie fit in versus a defenseman or forward? That placement still resides with the scouting staff. Even if you’re not a goalie guy, you can see compete and speed. If you combine the two, your scouts get smarter for working with a goalie-exclusive scout and learning about mechanics and technique.”
But those regional and head scouts are getting a lot more help from the netminding gurus these days. When Ellis goes to a rink, he might see Clay Adams with Utah, Scott Clemmensen of the Rangers or Jordan Sigalet scouting for Calgary. When Armstrong was coming up as a talent hawk, there were simply evaluators who happened to have a knack for finding netminders.
“There were certain guys back in the day who were really good,” he said. “So if you saw them at the rink, you knew you were at the right game.”
This article appeared in our 2025 Draft Preview issue. Our cover story focuses on the Erie Otters' star defenseman and top draft prospect Matthew Schaefer, who has excelled despite the personal losses of his past. We also include features on other top prospects, including Michael Misa and more. In addition, we give our list of the top-100 prospects heading into the 2025 NHL draft.
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