Arvid Soderblom

This Season So Far

The 2026-27 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

26 appearances, 8-13-3, a 3.80 goals-against average and a .880 save percentage with 1 shutout. His career figure across 112 games is .8869.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 180, which is tall and very light, and the technique has never quite settled. He is athletic enough to make the first save and his depth management is inconsistent — there are nights he is a foot too deep and the shot beats him clean.

Rebound control is the weakest part of a weak set, which behind a club that concedes as much traffic as this one is close to unplayable.

The Mental Game

Undrafted, 5 seasons in, and he has spent almost all of it as the second goaltender on bad Chicago teams. Nothing suggests he has stopped trying. Over his last 10 appearances he stopped .888 on 312 shots, which is better than his season and still poor.

The Intangibles

The pairing is instructive. Behind the same defence, in the same season, Knight stopped .902 and Soderblom stopped .880 — a gap of 22 thousandths, which across a full season is worth roughly 30 goals.

Chicago’s goaltending still finished 4 goals better than the chances it faced, which is entirely Knight’s doing and happened despite this.

He is 27 with 112 NHL games and a career .887. That is not an NHL save percentage, and the only reason the number of games keeps rising is that the club in front of him has not given anyone a reason to look closely.