Washington Capitals: Most Intriguing Players To Watch This Upcoming Season

Ilya Samsonov

I think this one is a slam dunk. The goaltending position is one of the most important, and one of the toughest positions in all sports if you ask me. It’s up there with quarterback in football in my opinion. A bad quarterback on a pretty good team probably won’t go too far. The same can be said for a goalie in hockey.

From what we’ve seen from Ilya Samsonov early in his NHL career there is no reason to call him bad by any means. There is just very little to go on which means there are plenty of questions going forward.

There are even more questions for this season now that his help and the teams safety net in Henrik Lundqvist will be sitting out the season thanks to some health concerns.

Samsonov is just 23 years old or will be 24 early in this next season. Age isn’t the big concern. The concern is his lack of NHL experience having played only 26 career games at the highest level of hockey.

Samsonov started his career just about as well as you could want. From the start of last season until mid January he had a 2.06 goals against average and a .927 save percentage.

The part you can question him on is after that he hit a skid for his last seven games of the season. His final seven games of the 2019-20 season saw him have a 4.11 GAA and a .873 save percentage. He has not played an NHL game since March 5th, a game against the New York Rangers where he surrendered 6 goals on 39 shots. That being an overtime loss, also known as the Zibanejad five goal game.

Samsonov has shown his ability for sure. But, he has not shown his ability to be an everyday starter in the NHL. Until he does there has to be questions. Those questions makes Samsonov the most intriguing player on this Capitals team next season.