This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Samuel Montembeault
Montreal Canadiens Goaltender
A .9011 across 62 games and the fourth-most shots faced in the league, on a club with the worst chance suppression but one.
| Season | Team | GP | W | L | OTL | GA | GAA | SO | SA | SV% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-19 | FLA | 11 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 30 | 3.04 | 0 | 282 | .894 |
| 2019-20 | FLA | 14 | 5 | 5 | 1 | 39 | 3.34 | 0 | 356 | .890 |
| 2021-22 | MTL | 38 | 8 | 18 | 6 | 122 | 3.77 | 1 | 1124 | .891 |
| 2022-23 | MTL | 40 | 16 | 19 | 3 | 133 | 3.42 | 0 | 1345 | .901 |
| 2023-24 | MTL | 41 | 16 | 15 | 9 | 127 | 3.14 | 0 | 1307 | .903 |
| 2024-25 | MTL | 62 | 31 | 24 | 7 | 166 | 2.82 | 4 | 1678 | .901 |
| 2025-26 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 206 | 80 | 84 | 28 | 617 | 3.21 | 5 | 6092 | .899 |
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
31-24-7 in 62 games, .9011 with a 2.82 average and 4 shutouts on 1,678 shots.
Montreal’s goaltending came in 4.8 goals worse than the chances faced, 19th in the league, in front of a defence that was 31st at suppressing them. A .9011 behind that is a fair rather than a good season, and the volume is the story — only three goaltenders faced more.
The Physical Game
6-3 and 218, and the game is athletic rather than structural. He is quick for the size and he moves a great deal, and he is square less consistently than a goaltender at this level should be.
The rebound control is the weakness — pucks come back into the slot, and behind a club conceding this many interior chances that compounds every night. The puck-handling is genuinely good and it is used to relieve a forecheck this defence cannot handle alone.
The Mental Game
Undrafted out of the first round, three organisations, waived twice, and a starting job at 26 that nobody expected him to hold.
He does not appear to be affected by volume, which is the specific quality the job requires here. There is no record of a bad night becoming a bad stretch and no stretch of genuine excellence either.
The Intangibles
A third-round pick, a career of being the third goaltender in every organisation he joined, and 62 starts on a club that made the playoffs.
At 29 the projection is a .905 goaltender who plays 55 games. On a club whose blue line is now two offensive defencemen and a shutdown one who cannot stay healthy, that is going to be tested.
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 rebound control is the weakness — pucks come back into the slot, and behind a club conceding this many interior chances that compounds every night.”
“The puck-handling is genuinely good and it is used to relieve a forecheck this defence cannot handle alone.”
“He is quick for the size and he moves a great deal”