This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Akira Schmid
Vegas Golden Knights Goaltender
Six-foot-five, a .9444 in five games, and the first Swiss goaltender to hold an NHL job in a decade.
| Season | Team | GP | W | L | OTL | GA | GAA | SO | SA | SV% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-22 | NJD | 6 | 0 | 4 | 0 | 19 | 4.83 | 0 | 114 | .833 |
| 2022-23 | NJD | 18 | 9 | 5 | 2 | 32 | 2.13 | 1 | 408 | .922 |
| 2023-24 | NJD | 19 | 5 | 9 | 1 | 48 | 3.15 | 0 | 457 | .895 |
| 2024-25 | VGK | 5 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 5 | 1.26 | 0 | 90 | .944 |
| 2025-26 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 48 | 16 | 18 | 4 | 104 | 2.73 | 1 | 1069 | .903 |
This Season So Far
The 2025-26 season has not started. The empty row above is his, and both it and this paragraph fill in on their own from the morning after he first plays: what he has done, what it is worth against his own last season, and the run he is on when the two disagree.
Last Season
2-0-1 in 5 games with a .9444 and a 1.26 average, facing 90 shots.
Five games is not a season and a .9444 across ninety shots is not evidence of anything. What it does say is that the club could put him in and not lose, which for a third goaltender is the entire job description.
The Physical Game
6-5 and 190 and he plays deep and enormous. He sets in the crease and lets the frame take the net away, and at that height and weight there is a great deal of net taken and not much left over for moving quickly.
The lateral recovery is the limitation and it always has been — a second chance from the far post is a long way for him. The rebound control is decent for the style. He does not handle the puck well.
The Mental Game
He started a playoff series for New Jersey at 22 and won it, beating a club that had been the best in the league in the regular season, and then lost the job entirely within a year.
That is a strange file for a 25-year-old and it is not a bad one. Forty-eight career games and a .9027 is a backup’s record, and the club is treating him as one.
The Intangibles
A fifth-round pick of New Jersey in 2018 and 48 games with a career .9027, and one of very few Swiss goaltenders ever to hold an NHL job.
He is 25 and Vegas acquired him in 2024. With Ilya Samsonov off the roster he is the backup on a club with genuine Stanley Cup ambitions, which is a considerable amount of trust for ninety shots’ worth of evidence.
What kind of player
The searchable half of the report. The first group is computed from the season's own data; the rest are read out of the prose above, and each one carries the sentence that produced it. A subject the report never raised is simply absent.
- a strengthread out of the prose, and claimed
- he lacks itraised, and he does not have it
Each computed tag also says how well its measure holds up from one season to the next, because a tag describes a season that has finished and a reader will assume it predicts the one coming. Some do and some do not, and the gap is wide: five-on-five workload repeats well, scoring late does not repeat at all.
“**6-5 and 190 and he plays deep and enormous.** He sets in the crease and lets the frame take the net away, and at that height and weight there is a great deal of net taken and not much left over for moving quickly.”
“The lateral recovery is the limitation and it always has been — a second chance from the far post is a long way for him.”
“**The rebound control is decent** for the style.”
“He does not handle the puck well.”