Who is on the Mount Rushmore of goalies from the shootout era?

Attempting to establish a Mount Rushmore of goalies in the NHL’s post-lockout era might only be slightly less grueling than carving four gigantic faces out of rock. 

Seriously, you can cram a lot of contenders into the crease if you’re talking about the best masked men since the start of the 2005-06 season. 

The impetus for casting our gaze backward is the fact, earlier this week, Carey Price confirmed what, sadly, the hockey world suspected: he won’t ever again don the pads and play in an NHL game and, instead, is focused on healing his wounded knee so that he can still enjoy all other aspects of his life. 

Though Price won’t officially retire until his contract expires in 2026, he adds to a growing list of era-defining goalies who have said good-bye in the past few years, including Roberto Luongo (2019), Corey Crawford (2020), Henrik Lundqvist (2021), Ryan Miller (2021), Pekka Rinne (2021) and Tuukka Rask (2022). 

If you examine the roughly 15-year period before the lockout that wiped out the 2004-05 season, you ultimately end up with a clean Mount Rushmore goalie foursome of Dominik Hasek, Martin Brodeur, Patrick Roy and Ed Belfour. Those guys won 13 of the 16 Vezina Trophies handed out between 1989 and 2004. Contrast that with the fact 11 goalies have won the Vezina in the past dozen years. The only repeat winner in that span, believe it or not, is Sergei Bobrovsky. 

Since 2006, “Bob,” Brodeur and Tim Thomas are the only two-time Vezina winners.  

That’s probably as good a segue as any to set our terms for this particular exercise. We’re not considering Thomas and Brodeur for the post-lockout Mount Rushmore simply because both have been on the sideline for nearly a decade. We’re also striking active goalies, so although Marc-Andre Fleury and Jonathan Quick will instantly become part of the conversation the second they retire, they’re not in contention yet.  

Who, then, are the top four retired — or, in Price’s case, nominally retired — goalies of the past nearly 20 years since we’ve had shootouts and increasingly deadly shooters with tech-enhanced weapons? Let’s dive into the blue paint and count them down.

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First, Honourable Mentions: Ryan Miller, Corey Crawford, Pekka Rinne 

If you’re talking the first half-dozen years after the lockout, Miller — the 2010 Vezina winner — can basically hang with anyone. Unlike every other ‘tender we’re about to talk about, Miller never competed in a Stanley Cup Final. That said, his Sabres were barely nudged in Game 7 of the 2006 Eastern Conference Final and would have been favoured in the showcase series versus the Edmonton Oilers. Miller was also an American overtime goal away from winning gold at the Vancouver Olympics in 2010. Believe it or not, Miller never got a single Vezina vote after winning the trophy in 2010. Ultimately, he was just a really, really quality goalie for a long time.  

Crawford was never a Vezina finalist, but he finished his career with a .918 save percentage and backstopped the Chicago Blackhawks to a pair of Cups, posting a stellar .932 save percentage in 2013 and a .924 mark two years later, in ’15. 

As for Rinne, he’s a four-time Vezina finalist and claimed the award in 2018 at age 35. Hip surgery in his early 30s took him off course for a couple years, but Mr. Predator has a statue in front of Bridgestone Arena that affirms his standing in the organization. He’s the easiest, by far, of the HMs you could see punching into the top four. Rinne’s sole trip to the Cup final was in 2017, where Nashville lost to the Pittsburgh Penguins.  

Maybe we can get him a plaque at the bottom of the mountain? 

NOW, THE FINAL FOUR

4. Tuukka Rask: Among goalies who’ve played 500 games since 2005-06, nobody has a better save percentage than Rask’s .921. Rask had a sensational rookie season in 2009-10, then had to settle back into a support role when Thomas returned healthy the next season and won the Vezina Trophy, as well as the Conn Smythe. Rask, of course, was the No. 2 on that title-winning 2011 Bruins team. He was the starter on two more Boston squads that went to the final, but neither the 2013 outfit nor the ’19 squad could finish the job. Rask won the Vezina in 2014, part of a six-year stretch ending in 2014-15 when Rask averaged a .927 save percentage. That’s pretty remarkable. Although Rask remained an extremely dependable goalie for the duration of his career, he garnered serious Vezina consideration only one more time, when he was the runner-up in the pandemic-shortened 2019-20 season.

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3. Roberto Luongo: How in the world do this goalie and this writer own the same amount of Vezina Trophies? Luongo actually finished only as high as second once in Vezina voting, when he was narrowly edged by Brodeur in 2007. Still, the body of work is incredible. Somewhat lost to history is how good Luongo was during his second stint in Florida. From 2014-15 through ’16-17 — Luongo’s age-35, 36 and 37 seasons — the most endearing man on hockey Twitter posted a .920 save percentage over 163 games. Only four puckstoppers in the league who played in at least 150 games in that time had a superior mark. Luongo, of course, won gold for Canada at the 2010 Olympics, but he always gets dinged for the fact he couldn’t bring his “A” game in the 2011 final Vancouver lost to Boston. 

2. Henrik Lundqvist: The start of the 2005-06 season will always be inextricably linked with the career debuts of scoring stars Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin. That somewhat obscures how incredible it was to see Lundqvist step in for an Original Six squad that had been lost at sea before the lockout and immediately make the New York Rangers competitive. The first eight years of Lundqvist’s career are a case study in consistency. In that span, he was a Vezina finalist five times — winning in 2012 — and finished lower than fourth in voting just twice. From age 23 to 32, “The King” was never worse than top-six in Vezina voting. He, along with Luongo, is also the last link to the era when a starter played his pads off in the crease. He saw action in at least 70 or more games for four consecutive seasons, beginning with his sophomore campaign, and when he retired, in 2020, no goalie had seen more action in the post-lockout era than Lundqvist’s 887 games.

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1. Carey Price: This is probably the right time to make clear something we could have stated in the second paragraph: comparing all-time goalies to each other is by no means an exact science, not akin to something like measuring wood to build a deck. Rather, it’s some amorphous combination of undeniable numbers, accomplishments and, you bet, vibes. But you’ve got to lean on something to set one apart, and in the case of Price, it’s reaching the highest high. It’s almost unthinkable that Price, Lundqvist, Luongo and Rinne combined played in just one final and never won a Cup. And although it was fantastic to send Price off with an unexpected — and I mean really unexpected — trip to the 2021 Stanley Cup Final, his signature moment was sweeping the big boy awards in 2015, when he took home his only Vezina Trophy, plus the Hart and Ted Lindsay to boot. He’s the only guy on this list to have the latter two distinctions to his credit and the Lindsay, of course, meant his peers not only saw him as the best goalie in the league, but the most impactful player on the ice, full stop. For a three- or four-year period in the mid-2010s, there just seemed to be near universal agreement that Price — with his size, immaculate technique and preposterous athleticism — was the model all masked men were compared to. 

We had no idea at the time that the 2021 run to the final — when Price was still just 33 — was more or less the end of the line for a body that was breaking down. That showing now serves as a final reminder that Price, at his best, was in a class by himself.  

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