Being Exactly Average Made Alex Nedeljkovic The Best Goaltender San Jose Had
The Sharks 25, No. 18. Nedeljkovic saved six tenths of a goal more than an average goaltender would have last season, which sounds like nothing and was seventeen and a half goals better than the man who started more often. He is signed for two more years at a million dollars above the younger one's cap hit.
Take the two goaltenders San Jose dressed all last season. Cover the names and the contracts, and read the lines.
One started 34 games and stopped .896 of what he faced, at 2.87 goals against per sixty minutes, with 21 quality starts and seven really bad ones.
The other started 47 games and stopped .883, at 3.63, with 20 quality starts and seventeen really bad ones.
The first man is the backup.
The gap, in goals#
Hockey Reference keeps a column called goals saved above average, which prices a goaltender against what a league-average save percentage would have produced on the shots he actually faced. It is the fair way to compare two men who worked different amounts.
Alex Nedeljkovic finished last season at plus 0.6 on 1,049 shots. Yaroslav Askarov finished at minus 16.9 on 1,341.
Against the population rather than each other, the shape holds. Among the 41 goaltenders who started 30 or more games last season, Askarov's minus 16.9 was the fifth-worst, with nobody tied, and his .426 quality-start rate was 38th of the 41, again with nobody tied. Nedeljkovic's .896 ranked 24th, tied with Joey Daccord and Karel Vejmelka, and his .618 quality-start rate ranked 15th, tied with Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen.
One goaltender was ordinary. The other was among the worst regulars in the league. The distance between them was seventeen and a half goals, and the team in front of them gave up 290, third-most of the 32 clubs behind Vancouver's 314 and Toronto's 295, with nobody tied.
The money says the same thing#
PuckPedia carries Nedeljkovic at $3,000,000 for 2026-27 and $3,000,000 again for 2027-28, unrestricted free agent after. It carries Askarov at $2,000,000 for one season, restricted after.
The backup costs a million dollars more than the starter and is signed a year longer than him. Grier signed that extension in March, while the season those numbers came from was still being played.
Why he matters#
Askarov made 47 of the 82 starts. Nedeljkovic made 34. Laurent Brossoit made one.
Forty-seven starts is not a workhorse's season. Karel Vejmelka led the league with 63. Forty-seven is the range where a club is running a tandem rather than a number one, and San Jose did not choose that split in September. It arrived at it.
The tell is the gap between his appearances and his starts. He played 40 games and started 34, so six times he came into a game somebody else had begun. Askarov appeared 47 times and started 47. Every mid-game goaltending change San Jose made went one direction, and Nedeljkovic was the man who walked in cold.
A backup is supposed to exist so the starter's workload stays sane. In San Jose the causation ran the other way. The workload was not protected. It was rationed by results.
The best case#
His own record is the anchor, and it is the least dramatic on this roster. In the four seasons before San Jose he posted .901 in 59 games for Detroit, .895 in 15, .902 in 38 for Pittsburgh and .894 in 38, which is .899 on 4,355 shots across 150 games. Last season's .896 sits inside that band, and the plus 0.6 was his first non-negative goals-saved figure since 2020-21.
Best case is that nothing interesting happens. He takes 30 to 35 starts near .896, Askarov climbs, and the two of them move a team save percentage that finished at .881, 25th of 32 with nobody tied, toward the .895 the league's goaltenders combined for. Across the 2,431 shots San Jose allowed, sixth-most in the league, that gap of fourteen thousandths is worth roughly 34 goals. Nobody has to be good here. Average is the entire ask.
The worst case, and two arguments against me#
The floor of that band is a real season and it is in his file. He was minus 6.4 in 38 games for Pittsburgh in 2024-25 and minus 4.4 in 15 for Detroit the year before. A thirty-year-old catching the low end of his own range behind the sixth-heaviest shot volume in the league is not a hypothetical, it is 2024-25 in a different sweater. But the version that should worry San Jose is not that he is bad. It is that he is needed again. A club whose backup is its best goaltender is not a playoff club. Neither man recorded a shutout last season, and the Sharks were one of four teams with none.
Two arguments against everything above, and the first one is real.
- The two men did not face the same shots. Askarov saw 1,341 to Nedeljkovic's 1,049, and nothing in the public season table splits their workloads by shot quality. Treat "same environment" as an approximation, not a finding.
- Twenty-four-year-olds improve and thirty-year-olds do not. Askarov's floor last season was awful, and his ceiling is still why San Jose traded for him. Nedeljkovic's ceiling is the band above.
What to watch, and it is checkable from a box score#
San Jose opens at home against Florida on October 1. Two things to count from there.
When his first start comes. If Nedeljkovic is in the crease inside the first three games, the club has already decided last season repeats, whatever camp says.
The relief appearances. Six times last season he entered a game he did not start. That number says a goaltending plan is being made by failures rather than by a coach. If it is at two or three by Halloween, the same thing is happening again.
And the simple one. Nedeljkovic took 34 of San Jose's 82 starts last season, 41.5 percent. If his share through October is at or above that, nothing has changed.
The stakes#
San Jose has missed the playoffs seven years running, the last berth coming in 2018-19, and spent this summer rebuilding a blue line rather than tuning one. That work is invisible if the goaltending repeats. The club finished with 86 points, and the cheapest goals on the roster are the seventeen and a half sitting between its own two goaltenders.
Eighteenth is where a countdown puts a backup. It is too low for the better half of this tandem, and the honest reason it is not higher is that his own team keeps deciding the same thing.
Previous in the series: No. 19, Nolan Allan.
Sources: Hockey Reference (San Jose team page, Nedeljkovic's player page, the 2025-26 league goalie table and the 2025-26 league team table, all read August 31, 2026); PuckPedia (Sharks contracts and cap sheet, read August 31, 2026).
