Sam Montembeault's Chance to Rebound
As a Montreal Canadiens fan, the 2025-2026 season was special in many ways, but it wasn’t great for everyone; goalie Sam Montembeault had a very bad year, and that was unfortunate. He had the most starts for any Canadiens goalie through the three years of their rebuild from 2021-2024 and considering how poor the team was defensively, he was very good. He made 60 starts in 2024-25, one of five goalies to make at least 60 starts that year, and was very good again.
This isn’t just me saying this as a Habs fan, either. To clarify, we head to Evolving Hockey for their Goals Saved Above Expected stat (GSAx). It is just how many goals a goalie saved his team based on shot quality against. So, if a team allows 100 expected goals against on a netminder in a season, and that goalie only allows 80 goals, he has 20 Goals Saved Above Expected.
From 2022-2025, Montembeault was playing behind a defence that bled a lot of quality shots, but he succeeded, nonetheless. In the following graph, the goalies furthest to the right saw the highest expected goals against per 60 minutes, and goalies closest to the top had the highest GSAx per 60 minutes. In other words, goalies in the top-right quadrant saw a lot of quality shots and still performed very well:
These are all the starting goalies in that timeframe (at least 3000 shots faced). The other five goalies in the top-right quadrant were Ilya Sorokin, Igor Shesterkin, Lukáš Dostál, Juuse Saros, and MacKenzie Blackwood. That is a pretty good group of goalies for Montembeault to be part of across a three-year span.
Then it all came crashing down in 2025-26. Montembeault posted an .872 save percentage, the third-worst mark in the league of any goalie with at least 20 starts. He eventually ceded the net to Jakub Dobeš as Montembeault did not appear once, regular season or playoffs, after the March 7th Trade Deadline.
As we head to the 2026-27 season, Montembeault is still on Montreal’s roster, and young netminder Jacob Fowler can be sent to the AHL without going through waivers. Maybe they go to a three-goalie rotation as they did for a stretch last year, but it seems very likely that Fowler goes to the AHL to get his workload up while Montembeault and Dobeš are the NHL tandem. Montembeault is in the last year of his contract before heading to unrestricted free agency, so Montreal doesn’t really need to force him starts; if he’s not playing well early, he’ll lose the net again.
All this got me thinking: what are the chances Montembeault returns to his form of 2022-2025? Was the 2025-26 season an aberration, or the start of a new trend?
Let’s go back to the GSAx stat from Evolving Hockey. Rather than look at 60-minute rates as we did in the previous graph, let’s look at Shots Per Goal Saved Above Expected. In this instance, the lower numbers are better because they tell us which goalies required the fewest shots to generate one GSAx. To figure out goalies who found themselves in Montembeault’s situation, this is what we’re doing:
· Finding every three-year total of Shots Per GSAx for every goalie since 2007.
· Finding the 10 lowest Shots Per GSAx in each three-year stretch.
· Finding which goalies followed up a top 10 three-year stretch with a below-average (for them) performance.
· Finding what those goalies did after their down season.
So, we are looking at five seasons in total: a three-year stretch to establish a baseline, each goalie’s Shots Per GSAx the next season, and their Shots Per GSAx the following year. The three-year baseline will require at least 3000 shots faced (roughly what is needed to qualify as a starter for our baseline), and the follow-up seasons will require 600 shots faced each to avoid guys being bounced out of the NHL, retiring, or suffering a severe injury.
The final note is we are doing drops/improvements by percentage. For example, if a goalie’s initial three-year baseline is 100 Shots Per GSAx, and the next year it’s 120, then it’s a decline of 20%. Remember that lower numbers are better, so going from 100 Shots Per GSAx to 120 is a ‘decline’ while 100 to 80 is an ‘improvement’.
The following graph shows the goalies who fit those parameters and saw their Shots Per GSAx decline the next season, and then what happened the year after. Goalies to the top-left of our red lines are those who improved in the season following their decline:
Apologies for the scale here, but Jacob Markström’s Vezina-calibre 2023-24 season after being mostly average for his entire career is throwing everything off. Either way, here is what happened:
· There were 21 starting goalies whose three-year baseline was followed up by a subpar performance in the next season.
· Of those 21 goalies, 16 of them improved on their subpar performance the following season.
· Of those 21 goalies, 9 of them had a follow-up season that was even better than their 3-year baseline.
· Of those 21 goalies, 16 of them had a follow-up season after their subpar performance that was either better than their 3-year baseline, or no more than 50% worse.
For posterity, here is the entire list of our 21 goalies sorted by best follow-up seasons:
The key might be the last bullet point where 16/21 goalies whose year after their poor performance either exceeded their 3-year baseline or was no more than 50% worse. If Montembeault’s 2026-27 performance by Shots Per GSAx is 50% worse than what he did from 2022-2025, he’s roughly an average starter, maybe a bit worse. That would be a substantial improvement on 2025-26, and if Dobeš continues his stellar performance, it gives the Canadiens a very good tandem goaltending duo.
There is always a chance Montembeault doesn’t rebound. One of the goalies on our list who just kept getting worse was Jonas Hiller. His follow-up season (Year 5) was 2014-15, and he had one more year in the NHL then never made it back. Henrik Lundqvist had another couple very good seasons but then a few poor (for him) seasons before retiring. It isn’t a lock that Montembeault rebounds.
Even if there is a chance Montembeault doesn’t find his form of two years ago, he still stands a good chance of getting most of the way back. Just how far he bounces back is the question, but we have seen top goalies like Ilya Sorokin and Jake Oettinger have bad years and get back close to, or past, where they were. Goalies are goalies, so only the Hockey Gods know what will happen, but given what we’ve seen here today, and Montembeault being so good for so long, I would bet on him getting back to at least starter-quality status.
