How Blue Jackets' Evan Gardner emerged as a top goalie prospect

New York Times

6 days ago

MINNEAPOLIS — When Saskatoon Blades general manager Colin Priestner broke the news to Evan Gardner following a Nov. 30 game that he didn't get invited to Hockey Canada's selection camp for the 2025 World Junior team, he immediately broke down into tears.
'What else can I do?' Gardner asked.
Nothing, Priestner told him.
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'He had the highest numbers of anyone, the most wins, and he did it last year too,' Priestner said on a phone call back in December. 'I wouldn't be surprised if he's the starter or the backup next year, and you've just got to dust yourself off and prove them wrong.'
Eight months later, almost to the day, Gardner was standing inside Ridder Arena wearing Hockey Canada workout gear at the World Junior Summer Showcase, where he's vying to make the 2026 team in Minneapolis.
'I was pretty heartbroken not to get an invite at Christmastime,' Gardner said. 'Last summer, I didn't get an invite either, so I was really working towards that winter, and to hear that I didn't get it, it kind of tore me apart. So I really put in a ton of time into my craft and a ton of work with my goalie coach (Jeff Harvey) back in Saskatoon to hopefully get an invite here, and it panned out, so I'm super pumped. This is something that's super special for me. It's something I've been wanting to do for a long, long time.'
He's not the front-runner. Returnees Carter George and Jack Ivankovic both played well in Canada's disappointing quarterfinal exit in 2025 and were sent home early on Thursday to leave Gardner and Sharks first-round pick Joshua Ravensbergen to play Canada's final two games against Sweden and the USA.
At the moment, he's vying to be the team's No. 3. But he's used to a little adversity.
It's the 19-year-old goaltender's first Hockey Canada experience. He never played for them at the U17 or U18 levels.
He grew up in Fort St. John, British Columbia, a town of about 20,000 people, and they only had AA hockey at the time. He was always on the A team until he moved to Kelowna to enroll at RINK Hockey Academy.
He was a third-round pick in the 2021 WHL bantam draft and is the first to say that if it weren't for the delayed COVID draft pushing it from the spring and into December, he would have been drafted much later. His play with the RINK Hockey Academy's U18 team in the fall that year earned him the third-round selection.
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He didn't make the Blades as a 16-year-old and was their backup to start his NHL Draft season the following year. When NHL Central Scouting released its players to watch list for the 2024 draft, he was given a 'W' rating, which indicates a 6th/7th round candidate. On their midterm list that year, he was their No. 16-ranked North American goalie.
He's also on the smaller side (Hockey Canada lists him at 6-foot and 175 pounds, and the WHL lists him at 6-foot-1 and 177 pounds).
But he just kept playing well, and as the year went on, he took the net in Saskatoon from the veteran Austin Elliott (who backstopped the London Knights to an OHL title and Memorial Cup this spring after the Blades released him to hand the net to Gardner). By year's end, he'd posted a .927 save percentage. Despite having played just 30 WHL games, NHL Central Scouting moved him up to No. 7 on their final list. He then posted a .910 save percentage in another 15 playoff games.
The Blue Jackets selected him in the second round of the draft and made him the fourth goalie selected after Ilya Nabokov, Mikhail Yegorov and George, who was selected three spots in front of him. There were members of the Blue Jackets organization who liked him better than George, and it became an internal debate for them ahead of the draft.
Gardner has felt the love from the Blue Jackets, too.
'Their goalie staff is unbelievable there, and they have so much faith in me,' he said. 'They've treated me great, I've learned a lot from them, and I can't wait for what the future holds.'
After a solid post-draft season as Saskatoon's starter, Gardner now has a .917 save percentage across 74 career WHL regular-season games and has already signed his entry-level contract with the Blue Jackets. In the spring, he made his AHL debut with the Cleveland Monsters and stopped 16 of 19 shots in a 3-0 loss.
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When he maps out his path, he stops himself to chuckle. The third-round selection in the WHL draft lit a fire under him.
'There were, I believe, six goalies taken in front of me (in the WHL),' he pointed out, remembering the number.
Getting cut by the Blades at 16 grew that fire.
'I was just hoping a team would take a flier on me. That's all I wanted, was just to show a team what I was capable of, and then I had a great second half and kind of took over in the playoffs,' he said.
Once Gardner started getting starts early on in his draft year, Dan Da Silva, Saskatoon's head coach, said they could see the breakout second half coming.
'They were always quality starts and we had a really good team in front of him, but there came a point where we just felt that we were most comfortable with him back there as the last line of defence and for a 17-year-old goalie to give you that type of confidence in your chances to win a game, that speaks volumes to the work he had put in to get himself to that,' Da Silva said on a phone call on Wednesday.
Gardner has done it while managing Type 1 diabetes.
'He is beloved by all of his teammates. He's a very popular guy in the room. He's a very happy-go-lucky guy. He's always got a smile on his face. He's easy to talk to,' Da Silva said. 'He obviously does a lot there with his diabetes situation and handles that extremely well, and mature beyond his years for someone having to deal with that.'
He was diagnosed eight years ago this summer, when he fell ill on a trip with his parents to Kelowna for a Blue Jays baseball camp and had to be hospitalized. His parents had noticed some symptoms crop up, including some weight loss. He still has to check his blood sugar levels during games, though he no longer has to take a finger-prick test to do so and instead uses Dexcom, a glucose monitoring system on his phone.
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'I have a few things that are connected to me. I have a pump,' he said, lifting his right sleeve to reveal it on his shoulder. 'During intermissions, I'm always checking it. Lots of snacks during the intermissions just to make sure I'm not going low during the game.'
He also missed all of February last season with a lower-body injury.
Hockey Canada — who were in touch with Harvey and Monsters goalie coach Brad Thiessen about Gardner through last season, even after they didn't invite him to selection camp — were impressed by how he managed the starter workload, how he played once he returned in March from his injury and how he played in his AHL debut.
Harvey and Thiessen also raved about him to Dan De Palma, Team Canada's goalie coach.
'Evan's been playing good goal for a long time now, and I understand why he'd be disappointed (last December) and rightly so, but he just kept playing good,' De Palma said. 'Evan has earned it. He earned the right to be here, and arguably he could have been here before, but he's here now, which is great.'
De Palma describes Gardner as a very sound, technical, competitive goalie who doesn't make mistakes. In working with him this week, he has found him to be very coachable as well.
'So he's got that talent, he's got that work ethic, and then he's able to continue to learn,' De Palma said. 'Really polite, respectful, engaging. He's just a super young man, and I've heard a lot about him from Jeff and Brad, and they couldn't speak highly enough about him, and I think he has even exceeded what I thought he would be.'
De Palma, who was a small goalie himself, doesn't see size in his evaluations either. (With Gardner, George and Ivankovic, three of Canada's goalies at the summer showcase were on the smaller side.)
'I don't look at height, I don't look at a whole lot of that in terms of anything. It's just 'who's going to stop the puck?' and obviously there's more to it than that and that's oversimplified, and for sure a guy that's taller has a little bit of an advantage, but at the end of the day if he's the best guy for the job to help us win a gold medal then that's all that we care about,' De Palma said.
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In his debut in the Red-White game, Gardner stopped 14 of 17 shots in a 4-3 shootout loss, but two of the goals came on the power play, and the other was with the opposing net empty. He also stopped the first five shots he faced in the shootout, before finally giving up the winner in the sixth round in a bit of a duel with Ravensbergen.
Da Silva has always been most impressed by Gardner's ability to read plays.
'He's a very smart goaltender. He can read shooters really well, he can read how plays are developing and knows where everybody is on the ice and if there's guys backdoor or high slot. He's always got his head on a swivel, and he's always checking and scanning the ice,' he said. 'He's very sound positionally. He doesn't get out of position. You don't see him scrambling or sliding past his posts or getting out of position very much at all. He knows his crease very well, he knows his posts very well, and he just uses his size. He's very, very calm in there.'
Gardner believes his skating is actually his No. 1 attribute.
'I'm able to put myself in spots, my habits, and the little things you can pick up on if you really watch me that I believe help set me up for success down the road and ahead of what's happening (in) the play,' he said. 'And then when it comes down to it, I just find a way to stop pucks, which is what everyone wants, right? I compete on it, and I just find a way to stop pucks.'
Last year, Priestner estimated Gardner alone was probably worth a third of the Blades' wins.
'He's just so consistent. He rarely has a bad game, and if he does, it's a one-off,' Priestner said. 'He's so projectable because he's so consistent. He doesn't have those games where he's not very good; he's just always really good.'
After one more year in the WHL with the Blades, they think he'll offer that for the Monsters and then the Blue Jackets someday, too.
'We're pretty biased, but he's a special goalie,' Priestner said.
(Photos courtesy of Steve Hiscock / WHL)