By Tony Abbott -
Jesper Wallstedt is the story of the Minnesota Wild and their November turnaround. No shade to Filip Gustavsson (4-1-1 record, .921 save percentage this month), but "The Great Wall of St. Paul" is on an entirely different level right now. After Sunday's 32-save shutout in Winnipeg -- the second in franchise history! -- Wallstedt is now 5-0-0 in November, and 6-0-2 with a league-leading .935 save percentage for the season.
We'd usually say "it's a small sample size" here, but throw it out the window. It's end zone dance time.
Wallstedt deserves this one, especially since he was essentially left for dead as a top prospect based on... a small sample size. We know Wallstedt's story from last season. The Wild told him he'd get NHL time, only for salary-cap issues to immediately thwart that plan. However, what we perhaps overlooked was how much his lost season was affected by a handful of games at the beginning.
Wallstedt finished his season with the Iowa Wild with an abysmal .879 save percentage in 27 games. However, the worst games almost exclusively happened in his first 10 starts. During that span (through November 24), he had given up five or more goals in five starts and had an .844 save percentage. It's like hitting .090 for six weeks to start a baseball season. There's just no coming back from that.
The last 17 games weren't good, by any stretch of the imagination, but they weren't awful, either. Or at least, not that awful. After a two-week reset, Wallstedt went the rest of the way with an .890 save percentage. Mind you, that was all behind an Iowa Wild defense that, under Brett McLean, wasn't doing their goalies many favors.
Context matters, and there was a lot that went into Wallstedt's awful year. He was overpromised and clearly struggling with that as he underdelivered, with little talent in the AHL to support him. But all the scouting community saw was the underdelivering.
That's going to sound like a dunk on some really smart people, folks who talk to more scouts and watch more tape than anyone at this site does. It's not. Prospect evaluation is a tough gig: tracking the talent pools of 32 teams spread across a dozen or more leagues scattered around the world. Even the best are going to be wrong, and even the best can fall victim to recency bias.
But looking at Wallstedt's overall trajectory, this is what he was supposed to be all along. Maybe not "Vezina-caliber numbers," but there was a reason many considered him the best goalie prospect in the world until a year ago.
At every step of his development, Wallstedt handled himself well despite much older competition. That included two seasons in the AHL, sporting a .909 save percentage over 83 games behind the Iowa Wild's defense. A year where a goalie falls off the table entirely is always concerning, but the overall body of work gave a lot more to suggest that he'd be able to carve out a good NHL career.
While we've just seen Wallstedt excel for eight games, it's been a scintillating performance at arguably the worst time to be a goalie in modern NHL history. Entering Sunday, the league-wide save percentage for the 2025-26 season was .897 -- down from .900 last year. You have to go back over 30 years to the 1993-94 season to find a worse save percentage (.895). Meanwhile, Wallstedt is looking like Dominik Hasek (.930 in 1993-94). His three shutouts also make up for 10.7% of the league total through November 24.
Why was everyone out on this guy again?
Maybe it's just the Wild fandom that makes seasons when a goalie loses it all seem normal. Darcy Kuemper couldn't buy a save as a young goalie in 2014-15 or 2016-17, and all he's done since leaving Minnesota is win almost 200 games and a Stanley Cup. Devan Dubnyk played his way to the AHL in 2013-14 at age 27, but managed to be a Vezina finalist the next year.
It's also fair to caution about getting too high on eight games, and that will be the challenge for Wallstedt. Even when he succeeded for his first two seasons in the AHL, he'd go on extended hot streaks that were balanced out with elongated cold streaks. Wallstedt is going to have bad games and bad streaks, but how quickly he'll pull out of those tailspins will determine whether he's an eventual 60-game workhorse or merely a great tandem option.
But that's in the future. For now, Wallstedt has rebuilt himself into a formidable netminder, taking starts from Gustavsson. Since Gustavsson took five straight starts from October 28 to November 6, Wallstedt has scratched out five starts to Gustavsson's three. It's a big vote of confidence, especially since Wallstedt has taken starts against the Eastern Conference Finalist Carolina Hurricanes and the Wild's nemesis in the Winnipeg Jets.
It won't be surprising to see Gustavsson slot in against the Chicago Blackhawks on Wednesday, with Wallstedt getting the nod to face Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar, and the Colorado Avalanche. As quickly as he vanished from the map, Wallstedt is back on it.
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