The position of goaltending has plagued the city of Philadelphia for decades. Whether it is letting a future Hall-of-Famer just be a passerby through the organization or just never truly finding a long-term solution in between the pipes good enough to steal a game or two as the 20 skaters in front of him do everything possible to win the hockey game, it’s been an issue.
And like clockwork, last season, the failure to even come close to finishing with a respectable record boiled down to two major things: The power play not being able to do anything but maybe pass the puck around from the half boards back to the point, and the goaltending being historically terrible. It wasn’t even just a run-of-the-mill bad Flyers goaltending season, it was possibly the worst combination of netminders we have seen from any NHL team this millennium.
The Flyers addressed this issue by making a clear-cut tandem to start their season. They shipped out Ivan Fedotov to the Columbus Blue Jackets to not muddy the depth chart, convinced prospect Aleksei Kolosov to be content with playing down with AHL’s Lehigh Valley after he seemingly did not want to last season, and then brought in free agent Dan Vladar to be just someone capable of making appearances in this league.
And so far, it is working almost perfect. Through the smallest sample size ever that isn’t ridiculous, in the first three games of the Flyers season, the goaltending has been a net positive instead of dragging the team down. No longer being the cement block chained to the team’s proverbial feet as they attempt the impossible act of staying above water, whoever is in the crease has been able to backstop a team well enough to keep them in games.
With two starts, the 28-year-old Vladar has allowed just four goals on the 60 shots on goal he has faced, good for an outrageously positive .933 save percentage and a 2.02 goals against average. On the other side, in Ersson’s single game he saved 35 of the 39 shots on goal in a crazy-high workload game against the pestering Carolina Hurricanes last week. His .893 save percentage isn’t amazing but it was still a very good showing.
The raw save percentages and goals against don’t tell the full story, though.
The numbers show massive improvement
Using the typical advanced metric for goaltending, Goals Saved Above Expected (GSAx), we can see that the Flyers’ tandem is performing very, very well. Through these three games, Dan Vladar sits 18th in the entire NHL with a 1.62 GSAx and Ersson’s one single appearance against that shot-heavy Hurricanes team, places him 14th in the league with a 1.97 GSAx, according to Evolving-Hockey. Any positive number in that metric is a good thing for the Flyers, especially considering how last season went.
In the 2024-25 season, the Flyers had three of the five worst goaltenders in the entire NHL, using the same metric. Ersson owned a -22.09 GSAx, which ranked him dead last at 112th in the league, Fedotov had a -12.03 GSAx (110th), and Aleksei Kolosov earned a -11.09 GSAx (108th). It was downright terrible. Like we said, historically bad. Any improvement whatsoever would be a good sign, but to flip the switch and start this season in the positive when it comes to this metric, could mean massive results down the line.
Even if Ersson and Vladar stay at their current GSAx, meaning that the rest of the way they save as many goals as expected and they are just slightly in the positive, it could mean that we find this team battling for a playoff spot in several months. Even if the power play stays as bad as it was last season (which feels somewhat impossible), the Flyers would suddenly have a difference of 48.8 goals, comparing last year’s total of goals (not) saved above expected and this year’s. It’s not a perfect equation, but the Flyers also just so happened to finish last season with a minus-48 goal differential.
Suddenly, the Flyers wouldn’t have abysmal netminders but somewhere around the level of “just okay” as goaltenders like Joonas Korpisalo (1.77 GSAx last season) and Ilya Samsonov (1.61 GSAx) were a year ago. And that difference would jolt more than just a few wins into the Flyers’ record and that already provides such a strong foundation for the potential of playoffs, or at least playing competitive games through the final weeks of the regular season. For instance, the Montreal Canadiens made the playoffs last season having scored just seven more goals than the Flyers did, but they also allowed 21 fewer. They were still a first-round out and many said they didn’t really belong in the mix, but that result after 79 more games is now not out of the question for the Flyers.
And this isn’t even asking much at all. It is to just simply stay neutral, not better than what the expected goals are against them but also not worse. Just do exactly what a replacement-level goaltender would do for the rest of the way and if the team sprinkles in just slightly more offense from the man advantage, and we’re talking about watching this Flyers team beyond 82 games.
It’s just been three games and this is a massive step to assume that the crease will not fall out from under them and the hockey gods will not maniacally laugh and point at just how miserable it is to be a netminder in orange and black, but we might as well be positive and optimistic when things look that way for the position that has been the reason this team has not found any success for so many decades.
