Here are the top 62 goalies to own in your salary cap league – May 26^th, 2022 edition.

The music on the goalie carousel has stopped once again, and the market seems to be just about fully shaken out. Vitek Vanecek and Alexandar Georgiev are the two winners, with Georgiev winning the plum spot in Colorado, and Vanecek landing himself a great new contract on an up-and-coming team that just needs a decent goaltender in order to be a playoff team.

Based on a little addition by subtraction, Marc-Andre Fleury lost his running-mate in Cam Talbot, and looks to be in line for a lot of starts on a good Minnesota team for the next two years. His fair contract is also great for the team and for fantasy owners. Also turning out well for fantasy owners, is Ilya Samsonov competing with band-aid-boy Matt Murray for the starting job in Toronto. He's also on a super friendly deal, will still be an RFA at the end of it, and will be motivated for that next contract.

On the flip side, the big money handed out to Darcy Kuemper, Jack Campbell, and Ville Husso will leave the fantasy managers that hold them with some doubts, as goalies often have trouble adjusting to new teams to begin with, and none of them moved on to a better defensive team.

Standard pre-rankings note:

This isn't meant to be a be-all and end-all rating system for you to use without thinking and just trade your players for anyone above them on the list that you can find, but used with some foresight for managing salaries. Cap hit is used for the player cost, so if your league uses salary or AAV, please account for that, as it can greatly change the impact of rookies. The rankings are set up so as to provide the most value in the current season, while providing some value in future years, based on modeling for predicted salary increases and production growth.

The stats used for the goaltenders attempt to balance both ratio stats as well as volume. For those of you with variations towards either end of the spectrum, leaning more towards volume or rate stats, you will want to account for that change in value. Same thing goes for setting variations such as: number of teams, salary space, or roster positions. This list is made to be a baseline guide for player evaluation, and to promote discussion and understanding of how to optimize rosters in a cap league setting.

The goalie list comes not only with a rankings system, but with value tiers. The tiers (also computed by a formula of mine) represent a more general view on a goalie's value taking into account a few overarching factors. Cheap backups can have higher ratings but show up lower down the tier rankings. The high ranking is due to their low cap hits coupled with an established floor with some possible upside. The lower tier is a result of them having uncertain volume, and the lower likelihood of hitting their upside in any given year. In general, aim to have the highest rated players if you are looking to be most cap efficient, but use the tiers if you just want to focus on having the best goalies and you are comfortable paying a little more for that security (my preference is usually to lean towards the more cap efficient options because of how variable goalies can be).

If you note a mistake, or have any further questions about the ranking system, please let me know. You can find me on Twitter here @alexdmaclean.

Comments help with optimizing the values, because they're not perfect and they never will be.

We're sticking with the +/- 5.0 rating that Dobber uses on all of his rating schemes as the range for approximately equivalent value. The skater and goalie rankings are synched so that the value of a skater against a goalie can be compared, though the scale of the ratings has changed a little since the last update.