This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Joel Hofer
St. Louis Blues Goaltender
Six-foot-five, a .9035 in 31 games, and the best career save percentage on the roster.
| Season | Team | GP | W | L | OTL | GA | GAA | SO | SA | SV% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-22 | STL | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 6 | 3.07 | 0 | 50 | .880 |
| 2022-23 | STL | 6 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 17 | 3.22 | 0 | 179 | .905 |
| 2023-24 | STL | 30 | 15 | 12 | 1 | 72 | 2.65 | 1 | 830 | .913 |
| 2024-25 | STL | 31 | 16 | 8 | 3 | 74 | 2.64 | 1 | 767 | .903 |
| 2025-26 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 69 | 35 | 22 | 5 | 169 | 2.71 | 2 | 1826 | .907 |
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
16-8-3 in 31 games with a .9035, a 2.64 average and 1 shutout, facing 767 shots.
It is the third consecutive season in which he has out-saved the man in front of him on the depth chart, and a career .9074 across 69 games is better than the starter’s.
The Physical Game
6-5 and 193 and he takes up a great deal of the net. The style is deep and controlled — he sets at the top of the crease and lets the frame do the work rather than challenging.
The size covers the top of the net almost entirely and the rebound control is good for a goaltender built this way, which is the thing that usually goes wrong. The lateral recovery is the limitation: a second chance from the far post is a longer journey for him than for a smaller man. He does not handle the puck especially well.
The Mental Game
Three seasons of thirty-odd starts behind a Stanley Cup winner, with no visible impatience and no bad stretch long enough to cost him the job.
Sixty-nine NHL games is not enough to know whether he can carry sixty starts. What it is enough for is to say that he has never been the reason a night went badly.
The Intangibles
A fourth-round pick in 2018 out of Portland, and 69 NHL games in with a career .9074.
He is 25. The club has a starter signed through 2027 with a Stanley Cup and a worse save percentage, and that is the most interesting unresolved question on the roster.
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.
“The style is deep and controlled — he sets at the top of the crease and lets the frame do the work rather than challenging.”
“**the rebound control is good for a goaltender built this way**, which is the thing that usually goes wrong.”
“The lateral recovery is the limitation: a second chance from the far post is a longer journey for him than for a smaller man.”
“He does not handle the puck especially well.”