The Chicago Blackhawks have extended forward Frank Nazar for seven years with an AAV of just under $6.6M per season. The 13^th overall pick from the 2022 draft has 13 goals and 27 points in 56 career NHL games, though he finished the season strong with 8 goals and 8 assists in 27 games after the Four Nations break. He has one more year left on his entry-level deal so this doesn't kick in until 2026, meaning he may be with Chicago for eight more years.

For a guy with 56 career NHL games, this is a sizeable bet by the Blackhawks, but one without a huge downside. At worst, if he ends up like Jesperi Kotkaniemi in Carolina, which is to say a bottom-6 forward at a modest cap hit, then it's not ideal but not terrible. If he keeps progressing as he showed last year, this is a steal maybe as soon as it starts in 2026, and likely not long after.

The question for Nazar's fantasy value is where they see him playing. If they use him and Connor Bedard in tandem on the top line, that could be great. If they see him as the second-line centre behind Bedard, well, there's not very much offensive talent in Chicago right now. It is something to revisit in a year because he's still on his ELC so the increased price doesn't matter yet.

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A couple weeks ago, I wrote about finding this season's Zach Werenski – a defenceman who had all the pieces to be a great fantasy option and could finally put it together. Yesterday, we looked at finding this season's Dylan Holloway – a depth forward breakout. Today, we are going to the net and looking for this season's Darcy Kuemper.

We are using data from Evolving Hockey and Frozen Tools, unless otherwise indicated.

What do we mean by The Next Darcy Kuemper? Well, it's a goalie who should fit the following parameters:

• Won't be a top-10 goalie on draft boards for one-year leagues.
• Coming off a bad season but has had at least one good season.
• Has a good shot at getting over half the team's starts.

Preference may be given to goalies who change teams, but so few starters do that each summer that it would restrict our potential pool too much (it would basically just be John Gibson this season).

Juuse Saros (Nashville Predators)

It was a down year for basically the entire Nashville roster and Saros is no exception. It was his first year with a sub-.905 save percentage and his first season finishing with a negative Goals Saved Above Expected (GSAx), which measures the shot quality each goalie faces. It wasn't just Saros, though, as his backups were even worse than he was in 2024-25:

That is why I'm not ready to hang the bad season around Saros's neck, at least not entirely. It would be one thing if the backups turned in a great performance, but they didn't, and by GSAx measures (overall or on a per-shot basis) Saros grossly outperformed them.

Where I get hung up is that Saros wasn't that good in 2023-24, either. Among 31 goalies with at least 40 starts that year, he was smack in the middle at 16^th with a .906 save percentage. When not considering the volume of starts and looking at GSAx, he was 26^th overall and behind several backup goalies. Considering it's a cumulative stat, meaning more games played lead to higher (or lower) numbers, Saros appearing in 64 games and finishing behind six goalies that had 30 appearances or fewer wasn't a great year. What carried his fantasy value was that starting 64 games in 2023-24 (led the league) helped him to 35 wins (tied for 6^th).

It could be the same this season as he pushes for 60 starts again, but this is now two down years in a row and Nashville would need a massive turnaround for him to be a 30-win goalie. Saros is often among the top 11-15 netminders, so I would rather draft Linus Ullmark or Jacob Markstrom a round earlier or later.

Thatcher Demko (Vancouver Canucks)

Demko started the 2024-25 season with an injured knee and never quite got his feet under him. It led to a huge downgrade from his 2023-24 season and aside from a brief spurt at the end of January/early February, he was fantasy irrelevant all year.

Here is the good news: if we can believe Demko's agent, he stated in an interview on the Donnie & Dhali show that Demko is 100% healthy and had already started skating (this interview was on July 2^nd). He said it was the first summer in a while that Demko is not doing any kind of rehab, so he's getting a full offseason of training. Now, any semi-serious sports fan knows the He's In The Best Shape Of His Life trope, but I also don't think that the Canucks would extend him for three years at $8.5M per season if there were serious concerns about his health.

And when Demko has been healthy, he's often been very good. From 2020-2024, there were 33 goalies who faced at least 3800 shots. Of those 33 goalies, Demko was seventh by shots per GSAx (the lower the number the better) and in line with a couple pretty good netminders:

There are legitimate concerns about how good Vancouver will actually be, but a full season with Marcus Pettersson and health from Elias Pettersson and Filip Chytil makes this a much different team than we saw for much of last year. Among fantasy goalies in drafts I've seen thus far, Demko is going somewhere around the 20^th overall tender, give or take a few positions on either side. He is being drafted as a lower-half second goalie on 12-team rosters, and considering the upside we have here, that seems like a decent bet to take.

Jeremy Swayman (Boston Bruins)

Swayman wasn't good in 2024-25, but it's important to point out why he wasn't good. And the reason he wasn't good was what happened on the penalty kill. Here is what happened:

• At even strength, Swayman posted -0.3 GSAx. That isn't great, but among 31 goalies with at least 900 shots faced, he was 23^rd. Again, not great, but he was far from the Juuse Saros/Samuel Ersson tier of awful, and not in the Alexandar Georgiev/Arvid Soderblom tier of bad. He was simply below average.
• On the penalty kill, Swayman posted -5.98 GSAx. Among the 31 goalies with the most shots faced on the PK, that ranked 30^th (only Cam Talbot was worse).

Had Swayman's PK numbers looked like those of backup Joonas Korpisalo's, he might push close to a .900 overall save percentage. Again, it wouldn't have been a year anywhere close to the two seasons before that, but awful PK numbers turned what could have been a salvageable fantasy season into a disaster.

That is why I have hope for Swayman in 2025-26. Not that I think he returns to the 2022-2024 levels he showed just because Boston is nowhere near the calibre of team that those rosters were, but Swayman is still the unquestioned starter and both Hampus Lindholm and Charlie McAvoy are healthy. 

Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen (Buffalo Sabres)

At this point, Luukkonen has had two bad seasons and one good one, so it's fair to wonder just how good he actually is. One thing worth pointing out is the struggles in front of him, namely from the blue line, and specifically from Owen Power (red is bad):

On top of that, when UPL had Power on the ice in front of him at even strength, the Sabres carried 47.5% of the goal share, which is basically 2024-25 Vancouver Canucks-level of performance (per Natural Stat Trick). When UPL didn't have Power on the ice, Buffalo had a 54.1% goal share at even strength, which is basically 2024-25 Dallas Stars-level of performance. That is a sizeable difference when a guy plays 35-36% of the team's even-strength ice time.

Assuming UPL doesn't just crash out and become an un-start-able NHL goalie, his 2025-26 season will come down to the blue line in front of him. If Power rebounds (he's still very young), and both Michael Kesselring and Conor Timmins perform as they have for the last couple years, this could be a much, much better defence group than what UPL had in front of him in 2024-25. One of these days, I will stop believing in the Buffalo Sabres to be a better team and even threaten for a playoff spot. Today is not that day.

Stuart Skinner (Edmonton Oilers)

Remember in the Swayman section where we saw his PK numbers being much worse than at even strength, even when considering their context? Well, the opposite is true for Skinner. His GSAx on the penalty kill wasn't great, but it was that of a low-end starting goalie. Even strength was a different story as his GSAx at that strength was 45^th in the league, and when factoring in ice time, he was dead last by GSAx/60 minutes among goalies who had a positive GSAx overall:

Whatever people may think of Skinner, this was an aberration compared to the 2022-2024 stretch. Here is how he did across those two seasons by save percentage and GSAx/60 compared to 2024-25 alone:

As of right now, Skinner is still Edmonton's starter, Edmonton should be a top team in the West once again, and he's generally been fine-to-good in his NHL regular season career, even-strength play last year being the exception. He doesn't need to be great to be a top-20 fantasy goalie just because of the quality of the lineup in front of him. He just needs to be better than last year to be a top-20 fantasy goalie, and if he has a big upswing, he does have top-10 upside.

When considering these goalies, it's important to factor in ADPs. Looking over data from Underdog Fantasy and FanTrax, Saros is going just outside the top-10 goalies, often in the 11-15 range. Depending on the league, he may be a top-75 or top-100 pick. The other four goalies listed – Demko, Swayman, Luukkonen, Skinner – are all going outside the top-15 goalies, and there will be drafts where all four are in the 20-30 range. That matters, and it's why I would lean to one of those four instead of Saros.

There are reasons to take all four goalies: Demko and Swayman have had legitimately great fantasy seasons before, UPL had a great year in 2023-24 and his blue line should be better, and Skinner's team is probably going to be a top-10 team in the league once again. If I'm taking just one, it's likely Demko. It seems like a good rebound opportunity for the Canucks, he's (presumably) healthy, and he had a four-year run as a top-10 goalie in the league before 2024-25. But I think all four goalies have their merits and wouldn't begrudge someone for betting on Swayman not repeating his 2024-25, Buffalo's improved blue line lifting UPL, or Skinner just getting a bit better and riding 55 starts to a 30-win season.