With Thatcher Demko officially back, the Vancouver Canucks finally – mercifully – re-assigned Arturs Silovs to the Abbotsford Canucks this weekend.
Don’t get twisted by the headline here. This was absolutely the right decision by the team. To say that Silovs has struggled thus far in the 2024/25 season would be putting it so mildly as to be borderline inaccurate.
Silovs has a 1-4-1 record on the year, to go along with an .847 save percentage and the “Yellowpages” special on his goals-against-average with 4.11. Believe it or not, the fancy stats show up even worse, with Silovs coming in at 9.0 goals-saved-below-expected, which is third-worst in the league behind Connor Ingraham and Alexandar Georgiev and straight-up worst on a per-game basis.
So, no, this is not an article purporting that the Canucks should not have sent Silovs down, or that he deserved more reps at the NHL level this year. No one is writing that article. The choice to send him down was barely even a choice, it was a necessity at this point.
But some have taken Silovs’ difficulties this year as reason to give up on him as a prospect, or as a potential future piece of the goaltending solution in Vancouver, and that, we’re here to say, is a step too far.
Heading into the season and riding high off a near-miraculous postseason, most had Silovs ranked as a top-five Canucks prospect, at minimum, and he received recognition as one of the world’s best goalie prospects. He’s no doubt slipped down a lot of lists in the interim months. But that could be an overcorrection.
There’s still ample reason to believe in Silovs – eventually – becoming that same quality of goaltender he was for segments of the 2024 playoffs on a more consistent basis.
We’ll start with perhaps the most important stat of all, that being Silovs’ age. He’s still just 23 years old, having had his birthday a few weeks ahead of the playoffs last year. That’s young by any reasonable standard, but especially so when it comes to talking NHL goalies.
Sure, it’s easy to look at someone like Dustin Wolf, born a few weeks after Silovs in 2001, currently challenging for the Calder Trophy with Calgary and think “Why can’t Silovs do that?” But Wolf, long lauded as one-of-if-not-the-best future goaltenders, is very much the exception, not the rule.
The fact of the matter is that only six goalies younger than Silovs have appeared in the league this year, and only five of them – Wolf, Spencer Knight, Devon Levi, Aleksei Kolosov, and Joel Blomqvist – have had anything more than a cameo.
The vast majority of NHL goaltenders then – the other 72, to be exact – are older than Silovs.
And that’s just in terms of ‘games played,’ not actual big-league success. Yes, Wolf is succeeding, and how. But the rest of the ‘younger than Silovs’ crowd? Knight is a backup with a .890 save percentage. Kolosov only just arrived, but he’s at .881. Blomqvist’s numbers are better than either of them, but then he’s still splitting time in the AHL.
Levi makes for an interesting comparative study, actually. Despite being born nine months apart in 2001, Silovs and Levi were separated by a draft year, with Silovs going 156th overall in 2019 and Levi going 212th overall in 2020. It didn’t take long, however, for Levi to surpass Silovs in most prospect rankings, brought on primarily by his eventual starring role for Canada at the World Juniors.
For many, Levi was the net salvation that the Buffalo Sabres had been desperately waiting for.
Flash-forward to the present day, and Levi’s had a very Silovs-esque showing in his 2024/25 appearances. A 2-5-0 record. A 3.95 goals-against-average. A save percentage of .870. And now, like Silovs, Levi has been sent back down to the AHL for more seasoning.
Which is not to say that the Sabres are still awaiting salvation. They’re currently getting great goaltending from one Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen at the age of 25. Where was Luukkonen at the age of 23?
Bouncing between the AHL and the NHL with an .891 save percentage, of course.
It seems that goaltenders succeeding at the age Silovs is currently at are very much the exception, and that goalies struggling at the NHL level – or not yet having earned a shot there at all – is the norm.
Let’s work with that latter thought. If you’ll recall, our friends over at DailyFaceoff wrote up a ranking of the top-25 NHL-affiliated goaltending prospects under 25 back in September. Silovs hit the list at eighth overall.
From that list, only those few we’ve talked about already, plus 24-year-old Justus Annunen, are playing anywhere approaching a regular NHL role this year. The vast majority of them are still toiling away somewhere in the minors or juniors, and you know why?
Because that’s typically what young goaltending prospects are supposed to do.
Which, we’ve got to point out, would have been the plan with Silovs. He’s been subject to a downright bizarre development path that saw him play just one AHL game in 2020/21 due to COVID shuffling, then 20 total between the AHL and ECHL in 2021/22. A year of sharing starter’s duties in Abbotsford in 2022/23, and by 2023/24, Silovs could be considered to be ‘on track,’ but not exactly knocking on the door for an NHL opportunity.
But that opportunity came bursting through the door all the same. Thatcher Demko went down, Casey DeSmith was not up for the task of replacing him, and Silovs came into the 2024 playoffs against Nashville and started to put on a bit of a show.
All of which added up to Silovs becoming Schrodinger’s Goalie. Look at him in one moment, and he’s stoning the likes of Connor McDavid in a high-pressure Game 6. Look at him another moment, and he’s letting in a lazy wrister from Bryan Rust at the blueline to put the Penguins up 4-1.
So which one is the real Silovs? The answer, as it never could be with that cat, is both. He’s the goalie who can steal games at the NHL level when at his best, but he’s also the goalie who needs more development and seasoning in the minors before he can do it on a more consistent basis.
Which, again, is the norm.
Which, in turn, is why we think Silovs still deserves to be counted as a top Canuck prospect, and a top goaltending prospect leaguewide. And why we think he still could very much be a part of the future picture in Vancouver.
Think of it this way. If last year’s playoff opportunity never happened, how differently might we have thought about Silovs? He had performed well in spot duty here and there, but was still very much a prospect. Even had Demko been entirely healthy, the team would have no doubt signed an NHL-ready backup for 2024/25 – maybe even Kevin Lankinen – and expected Silovs to continue solidifying himself as the Abbotsford starter throughout the season. Maybe they’d start thinking about him as a backup option for 2025/26, depending on how this year went.
Really, what’s changed? The only thing is that we now know Silovs could be a real difference-maker at the NHL level if all works out. And he’s still young enough to know that there’s some patience involved in figuring out that ‘if.’
We’ll end with a few more notable case studies of goalies struggling at the NHL level around the same age as Silovs is now, and then returning at an older age to hit their stride. The aforementioned Luukkonen is a good one.
How about Filip Gustavsson? At age 22, he appeared in spot-duty for the Senators and rocked a .933 save-percentage in nine starts. The next year, at age 23, he tanked down to a .892, was sent back down to Belleville for more tutelage, and then eventually flipped for the veteran Cam Talbot. Flash-forward to today, and Gustavsson is in the running for the 2025 Vezina Trophy.
Or how about Sam Montembeault, recently named to Team Canada for the 4 Nations Face-Off? Back at 23, he was one of the league’s worst young goaltenders for the Florida Panthers. He became Montreal’s starter by 25, but that was almost by default. It wasn’t until last season, at 27, that Montembeault really came into his own as a quality starting goaltender, and now he’s on Team Canada at 28.
Heck, we don’t actually have to go outside of the organization for a great example of this general rule of goaltending development. Remember Jacob Markstrom? Remember Jacob Markstrom…on waivers?!
It’s true. Markstrom wasn’t just a top goaltending prospect, he was once considered the very best hockey prospect in the entire world. But his road to the NHL was a long and twisty one, and even after being the centrepiece of a trade for Roberto Luongo, Markstrom failed to find his feet. So, at the outset of the 2014/15 campaign, the Canucks didn’t just demote Markstrom, they put him on waivers in order to do so. And Markstrom passed through those waivers unclaimed before being assigned down to Utica.
Markstrom was 25 at the time, a full two years older than Silovs is right now. And he responded quite well to the demotion. Markstrom wound up leading the Utica Comets to the Calder Cup finals that postseason, rocking a 2.11 goals-against-average and a .925 save percentage through 23 playoff games.
Following that, he backed up Ryan Miller for two more seasons before finally earning his first real starting position in 2017/18, at the age of 28. He’s held that job down ever since.
All of which tells us what we told you in the headline: it’s not time to give up on Arturs Silovs yet. It’s not even close. There’s plenty of time on the ol’ developmental clock for the 23-year-old Latvian, and what he’s doing right now – heading down to Abbotsford to get his game back on track – is exactly what a goaltender his age is supposed to be doing.
