Will three-goalie tandems become normal in the NHL?
Now that the Carolina Hurricanes have been crowned as the 2026 Stanley Cup champions, it’s time for other teams around the NHL to figure out what they can steal from them to replicate their success. While Carolina’s swarming forecheck combined with defensive acumen will be hard for any team to copy, their choice to carry three goaltenders for much of the season could be something other teams decide to adopt.
The Hurricanes kept the trio of Freddie Andersen, Brandon Bussi, and Pyotr Kochetkov on their roster, and it turned out that Bussi, the least proven of the three, became their season-leader is starts and wins, while crucially relieving Andersen in the Stanley Cup Final. With goaltending seemingly becoming more and more unpredictable, could we see more teams roll with a goaltending troika?
On Thursday’s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, hosts Tyler Yaremchuk and Carter Hutton were joined by InGoal Magazine‘s Kevin Woodley to discuss whether keeping three goaltenders could become a trend in the NHL.
Tyler Yaremchuk: As we look ahead towards the summer now, and how teams are going to handle this goaltending market, if Carolina, who carried three goalies for a chunk this season, if they had’ve punted on Bussi in November because they didn’t want to carry three goalies, their season changes, the whole trajectory is different. Do you think there’s a world where three goalies becomes more the norm or is that just overreacting to what happened in Carolina?
Kevin Woodley: I think there’s a world where it becomes more the norm, but I don’t know if it’s going to become the norm. I would point to Buffalo as an example of this. One of the first things Jarmo Kekäläinen said after coming on as the general manager was that the three-goalie thing doesn’t work, and by the end of the year in his post-season address to the media, Lindy Ruff was saying that it did work, we showed it worked, we think it might be able to work moving forward to the point where, and I don’t know that he can actually do this, but they were talking about every team’s going to have to have this practice goalie/EBUG and we won’t need that if we’ve got three actual NHL goalies. I think you still actually have to have one because inevitably when one of those guys gets hurt, somebody has to be there, so I’m curious how that works.
Seattle started the season with three goalies. Matt Murray got hurt, but they started the year and had the full intent of running the entire year with Joey Daccord, Philipp Grubauer, and Matt Murray. We’re trending towards this already. At the end of the day you have to have three guys that can play to get through a season. If that third guy now requires waivers, and you’ve got the cap space to keep him in the NHL and you don’t want to risk losing him like Florida did with Brandon Bussi, then maybe you hold onto him.
You can catch the full discussion and the rest of Thursday’s episode here…