The Crease Index: Ranking all 32 NHL teams long-term outlook in-goal

Over the past six weeks I’ve been diving deep into the future of NHL goaltending.

Back on August 16, we ranked the NHL’s top-15 affiliated goaltending prospects, and our No. 1 choice, Yaroslav Askarov, was traded soon after that article from the Nashville Predators to the San Jose Sharks. 

Since then I’ve been pitching in on goalie scouting reports for each of our team rankings, and on Friday we ran our top-15 current NHL goalies, with input from league experts in the space. 

Turns out I was also informally building another list in the goalie space, which we are unveiling today – The Crease Index. 

This is effectively a rating of how soon NHL teams should be looking at upgrading their current situation in net, and how paramount that will be for team success. To build this out, I scored all 32 NHL teams on a 1-to-4 scale in two categories, current NHL goalies and future. 

Future in many cases refers to prospects, but it also takes into account long-term paths for current NHL goalies. For example, Lukáš Dostál is no longer a “prospect,” but I’m high on the 24-year-old goalie’s long-term growth and I view him very much as a bona fide future No. 1. 

We then took those scores, made sure nothing was amiss and put them into tiers. It should be noted that within the tiers, teams are sorted in alphabetical order. That’s why the Buffalo Sabres are No. 1 on this list and not the Vancouver Canucks, B comes before V in the alphabet.