Here are the top 64 goalies to own in your salary cap league – Jan 26^th, 2025 edition.

We're back with the first update since the start of the 2024-25 season, and the goalie making the most noise is Dustin Wolf. He's on the list with the highest value rating, though his volume is holding him back from jumping up to a tier 1 rank. Once he proves that he's a 55-start goalie, without getting tired and tailing off in the second half. He will be a top-three goalie if he can keep these numbers up for the full season.

Now is that more valuable than what Connor Hellebuyck is providing? Well it's tough to beat the top goalie, but the smarter the fantasy GM, the easier it is to work around a few bigger cap hits from star players. Hellebuyck is worth every dollar he's being paid, and you don't give him up for anything this year. You leave the selling for the offseason, when his value has nowhere to go but down, because as much as it is great to own the top goalie, it's easier to manage your whole team when you have a solid goalie making half or less of what Hellebuyck is.

Standard pre-rankings note:

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 entry-level deals. 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 value 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.