Welcome back to The Journey, where we track the development of prospects as they excel in junior, make the NHL, and push towards stardom.

This week, we will begin an Uncertain Futures segment that will continue throughout the summer. Each instalment will highlight a player with an uncertain NHL projection who was covered by the recent Organizational Rankings project over at Dobber Prospects. Seven members of DP's senior staff, including myself, ranked the top 15 prospects in each team's pipeline and gave them a score from 1 (not fantasy relevant) to 10 (generational). I want to focus here on players who prompted a variation of at least four points between the editors. Player X would qualify, for instance, if he received a score of 5 from one person and a score of 8 from at least one other.

A spread that dramatic indicates a player's NHL projection is currently quite cloudy, and uncertainty is always interesting in fantasy. Should you sell high while they still have name value? Or is it a great time to hold or buy low? There are a number of factors to consider when ranking a player's future upside, including team context, deployment, skill-sets, trajectory, and past performance.

Let's dig a bit further into the first intriguing player that threw the Dobber Prospects team for a loop.

Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen, G (BUF)

Scores: 6, 6, 5, 7, 6, 6, 8

Luukkonen, 24, has been considered the Sabres' goalie of the future since he was drafted in the second round back in 2017. His size (6-5, 217 lbs), opportunity, and difficult-to-spell name have carried mystique in fantasy circles for nearly half a decade. After a couple years in the AHL, UPL finally made the jump to Buffalo in 2022-23 and played 33 NHL games.

Now that he has seemingly arrived for good, one would think his fantasy value would be peaking. But his middling performance combined with the dramatic emergence of upstart Devon Levi has thrown a big question mark over the masked man with the 6-k name.

The baffling thing is that UPL has rarely posted strong results at any point in his career to date, especially recently. Here are his Save Percentages in various leagues stretching back to his draft year:

Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen's SV% (2016-2023)

2022-23 (NHL): 0.892

2021-22 (AHL): 0.900

2020-21 (AHL/Liiga): 0.888/0.908

2019-20 (ECHL/AHL): 0.912/0.874

2018-19 (OHL): 0.920

2017-18 (Mestis): 0.909

2016-17 (U20 SM-sarja): 0.917

He performed well in Finland's junior leagues leading up to the draft and had one dominant campaign with the Sudbury Wolves in his Draft+2, but he certainly does not have the sparkling resume of other top goalie prospects—including his newest competition, Levi.

Devon Levi's SV% (2019-2023)

2022-23 (NHL): 0.905

2021-22 (NCAA): 0.933

2020-21 (NCAA): 0.952

2019-20 (CCHL): 0.941

While it was encouraging to see UPL with the Sabres for an extended stretch this past year, his -15.89 Goals Saved Above Average (GSAA) and -10.74 Goals Saved Above Expected (GSAx) are both pretty bleak. He performed well below league average and saved much fewer shots than he should have.

Some team context is important here, because the Sabres' stable of elite young talent (Tage Thompson, Rasmus Dahlin, Dylan Cozens, Jack Quinn, etc.) has perhaps overinflated how good this team is right now in the eyes of many fantasy managers. They definitely will be good, but 2022-23 was not a strong campaign for Buffalo by any means. In a year when several teams seemed to be openly tanking for a shot at Connor Bedard (here's looking at you, Chicago), Buffalo allowed the seventh-most shots against per game (32.9) and—surprise, surprise—the seventh-most goals against per game (3.66).

The Sabres look a bit like a younger version of the Oilers right now. Their shot differential (-0.4) was not nearly as bad as many of the teams around them, for instance, because they took the tenth-most shots in the league (32.5). Plus they also scored a ton, finishing third-most in the league in goals per game (3.61). So they are currently playing a high-octane style of offense-first hockey. The hope there, in theory, is that their goalie bails them out regularly and they score their way out of the deep holes they regularly fall into. That is certainly not a defence-first, goalie-friendly system like in Boston or Carolina, and that is important context for UPL's mediocre numbers.

Patience has been the mantra with Luukkonen since 2017, and his struggles as a rookie goalie on a burgeoning powerhouse in 2022-23 should not prompt poolies to abandon ship. This is a very high-stakes situation. Whoever emerges as the starter for Buffalo will have a ton of value in fantasy moving forward. While I am honestly pretty baffled why UPL has been held in such high esteem for the last five years given the rocky road he has followed to this point, I still think he has the inside track on the Sabres net.

Levi looked great in five of the seven NHL games he played in to end the year, and those games were particularly scrutinized because Buffalo was making a last-minute playoff push, but he is only 21 years old and came straight out of college. While that makes his achievements even more notable, I would preach caution in this case. Levi's is a sexy name in fantasy right now and his value in most circles is through the roof. But the list of 21-year-old goaltenders who have jumped straight to the NHL and put up fantasy-relevant numbers is extremely short (only Carter Hart?).

I like UPL's chances, at least in the short term, far better than Levi's. Luukkonen should have at least a season or two still to get his bearings—he is signed until the end of 2023-24—while Levi learns the ropes at the AHL level, and during that time frame I expect Buffalo to make significant strides forward as a team, which will hopefully include tightening up their defensive structures. The last thing Buffalo wants to do is throw their young star goalie prospect to the wolves while the team is still rounding into form. After a couple solid, remarkable years, for instance, Hart posted a -22.67 GSAA and fell hard from fantasy grace after looking like the next Shesterkin.

Goalie confidence is a skittish, magical creature. It needs to be cradled and coaxed like a small flame until it has truly taken hold—and even then, well-established NHL netminders regularly have major setbacks. Just look at two-time Vezina winner Sergei Bobrovsky (FLA), whose career performance looks like a yo-yo and regularly includes stretches of rough, shaky play. Or Jacob Markstrom (CGY), who went from Vezina nominee to trade candidate in back-to-back years after signing in Calgary long term.

Obviously, the best-case scenario here in fantasy is to lock down both UPL and Levi. Barring that, Luukkonen is the buy-low here. There has been something about Luukkonen's technique and approach to the game—that has not shown up in his career numbers to date—that has intrigued those who understand the intricacies of goalie performance far better than I do. Whatever that something is could very well show up as soon as 2023-24, and that potential payoff is very much worth gambling on.

*****

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