The Athletic’s Scott Wheeler discusses his top 20 NHL-drafted goaltending prospects, this morning, following his ranking of the 100 best NHL-drafted skaters yesterday at this time.
Five Red Wings skaters cracked Wheeler’s Top 100, and today, he ranks Sebastian Cossa as the 7th-best goaltending prospect, and Trey Augustine 8th:
Cossa had a really positive season in Grand Rapids last year, making important progress in some important areas. He’s a huge (6-foot-6), powerful, athletic goalie, and those last two things don’t always come with the first. He’s also a fiery, confident, talkative competitor who doesn’t like to get beat (which contrasts with the stoic demeanor we see in many goalies) and wants to command the net and the room. Bigger goalies often struggle with their movements and their recoveries, but neither is an issue for Cossa. His positioning (he does a really good job holding his outside edges to be patient on shots) and reflexes (he’s got great hands up high) help him block and grab a lot of pucks. But it’s his ability to bounce back into his stance or change directions with passes that separates him. His power through his pushes gives him rare side-to-side ability for a goalie that big as well.
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The definition of calm, cool, and collected, Augustine is the best goalie prospect to come through the national program since Spencer Knight (I like him more now than I liked Blackhawks goalie prospect Drew Commesso at the same age, for example). I’ve seen him play a ton over the years and I’ve always been impressed by his composure and the consistency of his play, whether that was in Plymouth with the program, Germany and Switzerland at two U18 worlds, Halifax and Gothenburg at two world juniors, or a trip last fall to East Lansing to see him beat the then-top-ranked team in the country, Wisconsin.
Continued (paywall); goaltending development is rarely a linear affair, so it’s not surprising that Jesper Wallstedt of the Minnesota Wild and Yaroslav Askarov of the Nashville Predators rank ahead of Cossa and Augustine right now.
Wheeler’s ranking–and insistence upon ranking goaltenders by tiers–doesn’t necessarily mean that the Red Wings prospects’ developmental “ceilings” are somehow limited in a way that the Wallstedts and Askarovs of the world are not.
Right now, it looks like the polished Wallstedt and dramatic Askarov are on a higher plane, but we’ll see where things shake out in five years.
