This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Lukas Dostal
Anaheim Ducks Goaltender
Nineteen games at twenty-two behind a club that conceded 338 goals, and a .901 that is better than it looks.
| Season | Team | GP | W | L | OTL | GA | GAA | SO | SA | SV% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-22 | ANA | 4 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 10 | 2.98 | 0 | 108 | .907 |
| 2022-23 | ANA | 19 | 4 | 10 | 3 | 67 | 3.78 | 0 | 679 | .901 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 23 | 5 | 12 | 3 | 77 | 3.65 | 0 | 787 | .902 |
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
19 games, 4-10-3, a .9013 save percentage and a 3.78 goals-against average, on 679 shots faced.
He outperformed Gibson on both numbers in the same crease, which is not a claim that he is the better goaltender — 679 shots is a fifth of a season — but it is the first evidence that the .899 in front of him was the building rather than the man.
23 career games, 787 shots, a .902.
The Physical Game
6-2 and 190, which is small for a modern NHL goaltender, and he compensates by playing an aggressive, quick game rather than a blocking one. He meets the shooter at the top of the crease and he moves post to post as well as anybody in the organisation.
The size shows on the second and third chance, where a bigger goaltender simply covers more of the net while scrambling.
The Mental Game
Nineteen games behind the worst defensive club in the league is a brutal introduction, and the save percentage held. He does not visibly deflate after a bad goal, which on this roster is not a small thing.
He has been the best goaltender in every league he has played in on the way up, including for Czechia at the World Championship, and the confidence reads as earned rather than assumed.
The Intangibles
Eighty-fifth overall in 2018, a third-round pick who has moved up the depth chart every season since.
He is 23 and the succession is obvious to everybody including Gibson. The awkward part is the contract in front of him: Anaheim has an expensive established starter having a difficult time and a cheap young one outplaying him, on a club that will not be good enough for the answer to matter for two more years.
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 meets the shooter at the top of the crease and he moves post to post as well as anybody in the organisation.”
“He meets the shooter at the top of the crease and he moves post to post as well as anybody in the organisation.”