At the risk of jinxing the Lightning’s most important player, let’s go ahead and take a look at some career milestones that Andrei Vasilevskiy could have in his sight this season. First off, these are all going to be personal achievements because he already owns just about every franchise record in the books. Yes Ben Bishop has him in career save percentage (.921 to .917) and goals against average (2.28 to 2.39) but a couple of good months could put Vasy right back on top.
First up is 300 wins. He’s currently sitting at 293 which ranks him 6th among active goalies. If he wins seven games before Frederik Andersen wins five, then Vasilevskiy will be the 40th goaltender in the history of the league to hit the 300 win mark. He also has a pretty good chance of besting Jacques Plante as the fastest player to reach that achievement. Plante did it in 528 games while Vasy is sitting at 477 games played. The Lightning netminder was the second-fastest to 250 wins, falling just short of Ken Dryden’s record. Dryden retired with 258 wins in 397 games over eight seasons, the Sandy Koufax of hockey.
Winning is what goaltenders do, scoring points is not. However, Vasilevskiy has an outside chance of overtaking Marc-Andre Fleury as the active leader in goaltender points. Vasy is sitting at 20 points while The Flower is at 22. Since becoming the full-time starter in 2016-17, Vasilevskiy has picked up at least two points in seven of his eight seasons. In his last four seasons, Fleury has just one assist in each of them. Both have a ways to go to catch Tom Barraso, the all-time leader with 48.
If Vasilevskiy makes it to 15,000 saves this year, he’ll become the 50th player to do so (actually, probably the 51st since Connor Hellebuyck is a lot closer). It’ll also mean the Bolts netminder is getting shelled. At 13,192 saves he would need to make 1,808 to reach the milestone. Only once has he hit that number and that came back in 2017-18 when he stopped 1,908 shots and had 8 shutouts. He’s only seen 1,800 shots three times in his career, which is probably a good thing.
