For No. 3 goalies on Stanley Cup teams, the NHL's least glamorous job still ends in glory

New York Times

7 hours ago

When his moment of glory approached, Scott Wedgewood knew his role. As the Lightning began the decades-old NHL tradition of passing the Stanley Cup to one another in Sept. 2020, Wedgewood hung to the back of the celebration. The goaltender didn't want to steal a spotlight that wasn't his.
Wedgewood wasn't on the ice when Tampa Bay won the championship that year, beating the Stars in six games. Nor was he the backup on the bench. He was the No. 3 throughout the 2019-20 playoffs, brought along to the Toronto and Edmonton bubbles just in case something went wrong with starter Andrei Vasilevskiy or backup Curtis McElhinney. Nothing did.
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Which is why, as Wedgewood and his fellow scratches burst onto the ice to join the championship dogpile, a voice in his head asked whether he even belonged. 'I kind of didn't earn it, but I earned it,' he remembered thinking.
He watched as the Cup moved among his teammates, first from captain Steven Stamkos to defenseman Victor Hedman, then down the depth chart from perennial All-Stars to valuable role players. Finally, after every other member of the roster had received a turn, forward Mathieu Joseph handed the trophy over to Wedgewood. He took the Cup for a small loop on the ice — long enough to make a cherished memory, short enough not to seem selfish about it — and lifted it over his head with a wide grin on his face.
As he wrapped up his lap, Wedgewood skated to Stamkos with a question. Jon Cooper, one of the NHL's top coaches, still hadn't touched the Cup. The team captain, Wedgewood figured, should have a say in who presented it to him.
'Do you want to give it to Coop?' he asked.
'No!' a euphoric Stamkos responded. 'You f—ing do it!'
And so it was that Wedgewood, despite never playing a single minute for Tampa Bay, first placed hockey's most hallowed piece of hardware in the hands of a coach who is likely bound for its Hall of Fame.
'That's kind of cool, too, to be the guy to do it,' said Wedgewood, now the backup for the Avalanche. 'Definitely a little humble pie in the back of the mind, too: 'Am I really doing this?''
No one focuses much, if at all, on the No. 3 goalies during the Stanley Cup Final. Barring an emergency, they don't dress for games, and most of the world doesn't see the work they do. Still, Panthers coach Paul Maurice calls third-stringers a 'critical part' of championship teams.
But No. 3s are valued, even if the emotional payoff of a win might be different from what players who actually appear in games feel. They're on call whenever someone needs extra work, Cooper said, as though they have a beeper in the back pocket of their goalie pants. And often in recent years, they find themselves in Wedgewood's position: passing the Cup to the winning coach, someone who will be remembered far more as part of the championship journey.
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Craig Berube spent more than 1,500 games on an NHL bench, either as a player, assistant or head coach, before the Blues beat Boston for the 2019 championship. He was handed the Cup by Ville Husso, who had yet to make his NHL debut. Then-prospect Justus Annunen gave it to Jared Bednar after Colorado completed its championship run in 2022, and Maurice took it from Spencer Knight with Florida last year.
'That's a really important idea at the end of the day: that the players are the most important,' Maurice said. 'They come first.'
That means all of them — even the ones with the least glamorous job.
A century ago, backup goalies — let alone third-stringers — weren't much of a thought. In the 1928 Stanley Cup Final, after Rangers goalie Lorne Chabot took a shot to the face and left with an eye injury, the lack of a No. 2 goalie on hand led to 44-year-old coach and general manager Lester Patrick putting on pads and finishing out a 2-1 overtime win between the pipes. The NHL didn't even require teams to dress two goalies until 1965-66, but nowadays teams tend to carry three on the roster during the playoffs: two in uniform and one in case of emergency.
A variety of factors go into determining which No. 3 goalie to use. If its affiliate is still alive in the American Hockey League playoffs, an organization might choose to have its actual third-best goalie playing games in the minors. Annunen, for example, didn't travel with the 2022 Avalanche full time until the AHL Colorado Eagles were eliminated.
This year, Florida's AHL affiliate, the Charlotte Checkers, is still playing, so ECHL goalie Evan Cormier has been with the club as the emergency backup. Kaapo Kähkönen would almost certainly come up from the Checkers if something happened to either Panthers starter Sergei Bobrovsky or backup Vítek Vaněček. Meanwhile, the Bakersfield Condors, the Oilers' AHL affiliate, didn't make the playoffs, so Olivier Rodrigue has been with the NHL club the entire time, even backing up a few games when Calvin Pickard got hurt.
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On some teams, Cooper said, the No. 3 job can be good for a developing player. Rodrigue, who is 24 and one of the Oilers' top prospects, falls in that boat. Wedgewood did, too. He took it as an opportunity to get daily one-on-one feedback from Lightning goalie coach Frantz Jean. Annunen appreciated the chance to watch how the Avalanche's high-level roster prepared for big games.
'You want somebody who's going to learn,' Cooper said. 'You want somebody who's glue, you want somebody who's going to work: not necessarily content in their role but (who) understands their role.'
Other teams turn to veterans to fill that role. Jonathan Quick was already a two-time champion as a starter with the Kings when the Golden Knights acquired him at the 2023 trade deadline, bringing a level of experience far different from that of someone like Wedgewood or Annunen. Quick never got in a playoff game for the Golden Knights, and only started regularly dressing as Adin Hill's backup after starter Laurent Brossoit suffered a hamstring injury in the second round. But coach Bruce Cassidy said that Quick had a calming effect on both Hill and Brossoit throughout the Golden Knights' road to the franchise's first Cup.
'If you have guys with a bad attitude in your locker room, typically you're not playing hockey at that time of the year,' Quick said.
Like Quick, Wedgewood was very clear on his role entering the 2020 bubble, joking that he 'wasn't going to play unless Vasilevskiy died.' So he made himself available at all times instead, helping Lightning players get away from hockey while isolated from the outside world with games of pickleball and rounds on a golf simulator. The goalie also estimates that he spent some 100 hours on Xbox playing 'Call of Duty: Warzone' with teammates, including Ondřej Palát, Victor Hedman, Tyler Johnson and Anthony Cirelli, often on game days after the morning skate.
'The first group of guys that would play would play (Call of Duty) with me before they napped, then the second group would play with me after,' he said.
Wedgewood's constant availability extended to on-ice situations as well. With Vasilevskiy sitting out some morning skate drills because of how much he was playing, Wedgewood was always happily ready to enter the net when the starter wanted a break. 'No one wants the third goalie to be moody and annoyed to be taking shots,' he said.
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He regularly stayed late at skates throughout the playoffs too, helping the other scratches — including Stamkos, who was working to return from a lower-body injury while in the bubble — get extra work. In total, the Lightning stayed in the Toronto and Edmonton bubbles for a total of 65 days. Wedgewood said he was on the ice for all but three of them.
Annunen similarly recalled his Avalanche teammates in 2022 using him to practice whatever they wanted after skates, whether breakaway practice, one timers or rebound games. As Maurice puts it, 'That's a lot of pucks, man.' The types of shots faced are also different. Whereas skaters might steer clear of shooting high when the starter is in the net, or a coach saves certain drills for when he leaves the ice, no such restrictions exist for the No. 3.
'I step on the ice, and there's a five-on-three or five-on-four power play set, and you've got Stamkos, Hedman, (Nikita) Kucherov teeing up,' Wedgewood said. 'You're not going to put any goalie other than me in that situation in case something goes (wrong).'
In rare cases, No. 3s get called into action beyond just backing up. Injuries forced the Canucks to play three goalies in the 2024 playoffs, with the Penguins (2022), Avalanche (2020) and Canadiens (2014) among the others to do so in recent postseasons. The first postseason it happened was in 1928, when the Rangers had to use Patrick and then, with permission from the league, Joe Miller from the New York Americans, a fellow NHL club.
Only one Cup winner since 1938, though, needed to use a No. 3 in the postseason: the 2016 Penguins. Matt Murray and Marc-Andre Fleury were both hurt to start the playoffs that year, so Jeff Zatkoff played the first two games of the first round, going 1-1 with a .908 save percentage. The Penguins recognized his efforts: He got his name engraved on the Stanley Cup.
Pittsburgh fans made their appreciation clear, too. Late in Zatkoff's first playoff start, the only postseason win of his NHL career, he was serenaded with chants of his name: recognition of both the rarity of the situation and the importance of his performance.
'Definitely sent chills through me a little bit,' he told reporters then.
For seven seconds last June, Maurice and Spencer Knight held the Stanley Cup together. The Panthers coach whispered a thank you into the No. 3 goalie's ear, then bowed over the trophy, almost as if in prayer. He had been behind NHL benches for nearly three decades and was now an undisputed champion.
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On the other side of the trophy, Knight wondered whether he had achieved the same honor.
'People say I won the Cup,' Knight said later that summer. 'I think I just say I witnessed the team up close win the Cup.'
When it comes to sharing in glory, No. 3 goalies on a championship team are put in inarguably odd positions. Each contributed in small ways despite, aside from Zatkoff and a few others in the 1920s and 1930s, not actually playing in the postseason. Some — including Knight, Wedgewood and Husso — couldn't even fall back on the validation of appearing in a regular-season game during the championship season. Do they truly feel like champions?
'I picture the ocean: You can be above the water for some categories and under the water for others,' Wedgewood said. 'That's kind of how it feels at certain times.'
Annunen, who was traded to Nashville by Colorado, ironically for Wedgewood, said it felt amazing to lift the Stanley Cup. He later received a championship ring, presented at a private dinner for Avalanche players, and Colorado played him a 'welcome back' video on the jumbotron when he returned to Denver as a member of the Predators, ending with a picture of him holding the Stanley Cup.
Reflecting on the experience, he thinks of his 2022 teammates, such as longtime veterans Jack Johnson and Erik Johnson, and can't imagine how they must have felt hoisting the trophy for the first time.
'You feel like you are part of the group, but it's a little different,' he said. 'I don't know how to explain it. Of course, if I would have been around more or played more it would feel even (more) different, for sure.'
Last summer, Knight got a customary day with the Stanley Cup, but his name wasn't engraved on the outer ring with the other Panthers. Including Quick, four Vegas goalies — the three who dressed in the playoffs, plus Logan Thompson, who led the team in regular-season starts before injury derailed his season — got their names on the Cup in 2023. But Annunen and Christopher Gibson, the Lightning's No. 3 in 2021, did not. Neither did Wedgewood, though he remembers Alex Killorn and some teammates messaging the group text that his name deserved to make the cut. The gesture touched the goalie, who still got to participate in the parade and received a ring and a miniature Cup trophy.
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Perhaps aided by how much time he spent with the Lightning in the bubbles, Wedgewood still views himself as part of the team. He never dressed for a game in the 2020 playoffs, save for an exhibition against the Panthers before the round robin to determine seeding, and spent most of the regular season in the AHL, never appearing in a game for the Lightning. But he compares lifting the Cup to hitting a hole-in-one in golf: The way the ball goes in, whether off a perfect shot or off a ricochet off a tree, doesn't really matter.
Still, he knows his role wasn't the exact same as those who actually played.
'Does the reunion come up in 10 years? Am I invited? I don't know,' he said. 'That'll be something up to them to decide.'
Wedgewood got plenty of validation in the moment. The night the Lightning won the championship, they left the rink and sat together in their team meal room in the hotel, sipping beers and reminiscing while passing the Cup around. While there, Frantz Jean, the goalie coach, made a point to walk over to Wedgewood. He had tears in his eyes as he thanked the goalie for all the work he'd done.
His role, glamorless though it might have been, was appreciated.