This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Filip Gustavsson
Minnesota Wild Goaltender
An .8920 in Ottawa, a .9309 in Minnesota, and one summer between them.
| Season | Team | GP | W | L | OTL | GA | GAA | SO | SA | SV% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-21 | OTT | 9 | 5 | 1 | 2 | 17 | 2.16 | 0 | 254 | .933 |
| 2021-22 | OTT | 18 | 5 | 12 | 1 | 62 | 3.55 | 0 | 574 | .892 |
| 2022-23 | MIN | 39 | 22 | 9 | 7 | 81 | 2.10 | 3 | 1173 | .931 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 66 | 32 | 22 | 10 | 160 | 2.51 | 3 | 2001 | .920 |
This Season So Far
The 2023-24 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
22-9-7 in 39 games, .9309, 2.10, three shutouts on 1,173 shots.
That .9309 is the second-best save percentage in the league among goaltenders who played twenty-five games, behind Ullmark’s .9375, and the 2.10 goals-against average is the lowest of any goaltender in these five chapters.
The year before, in Ottawa, he played eighteen games and posted .8920.
That is a jump of nearly forty points of save percentage in one summer, and this book records it as what it is: a very good season on a club that allowed the tenth-fewest expected goals per sixty at even strength, from a twenty-four-year-old whose previous professional record gave no reason to expect it.
Three seasons, 66 games.
The Finesse Game
6-2 and 184, and a compact, patient style that stays on his feet longer than most.
He tracks the puck through traffic unusually well for a goaltender this young — the specific skill Minnesota’s structure demands, because a club that concedes few good chances concedes a lot of screened ones from range instead.
Rebound control was the visible improvement between Ottawa and Minnesota: he was steering pucks to the corners rather than back into the slot, and three shutouts in thirty-nine games is what that looks like on the scoresheet.
Minnesota’s goaltending value finished fourth in the league. Fleury played forty-six games at .9078; this is where the other seventeen goals came from.
The Intangibles
Fifty-fifth overall in 2016 to Pittsburgh, traded to Ottawa before he played a game, traded to Minnesota at twenty-four.
Sixty-six NHL games is not enough to know what a goaltender is. The honest reading is a genuine talent whose one good season came behind a good defensive club, and a club that has now committed to him as the starter on the strength of thirty-nine games.
If the .9309 was real, Minnesota has solved the position for a decade. If it was the club, the club is about to find out.
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
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.
“He tracks the puck through traffic unusually well for a goaltender this young — the specific skill Minnesota's structure demands, because a club that concedes few good chances concedes a lot of screened ones from range instead.”
“Rebound control was the visible improvement between Ottawa and Minnesota: he was steering pucks to the corners rather than back into the slot, and three shutouts in thirty-nine games is what that looks like on the scoresheet.”