- Washington signed Cal Petersen to a professional tryout for 2026 training camp
- The 31-year-old hasn’t played an NHL game since February 2024 with the Flyers
- Read below for the full Capitals goalie depth chart heading into September
Cal Petersen is getting one more crack at an NHL roster.
The Capitals announced Tuesday that the 31-year-old goaltender will join their 2026 training camp on a professional tryout agreement. That makes him the fifth netminder headed to a Washington camp where the two NHL jobs are already spoken for.
Petersen hasn’t seen NHL ice since February 2024, when Philadelphia put him on waivers after a five-game run that ended with an .864 save percentage. Last season he played 33 games for the AHL’s Iowa Wild on a one-year, two-way deal, going 13-16-2 with a 2.73 goals-against average, a .896 save percentage and four shutouts.
Washington’s crease is not exactly open for business. Logan Thompson is signed through 2031 and Charlie Lindgren through 2028, and Clay Stevenson is penciled in as the starter in Hershey after 18 wins and a .912 save percentage in 37 games. Petersen’s realistic path is the AHL backup job that Mitch Gibson is also chasing.
Here’s the goalie group Washington is bringing to camp:
- Logan Thompson: NHL starter, under contract through 2031
- Charlie Lindgren: NHL backup, under contract through 2028
- Clay Stevenson: Projected Hershey starter, .912 in 37 AHL games last season
- Mitch Gibson: Split 2025-26 between the AHL and the ECHL
- Cal Petersen: PTO, 106 games of NHL experience
He also fits a weirdly specific pattern in that room. Petersen catches right, and so do Thompson and Lindgren, which makes Washington one of the strangest goalie departments in the league.
The resume behind the tryout is better than the last two years suggest. Petersen went 46-44-10 with a .903 save percentage across 106 NHL games, almost all of them with the Kings, and Los Angeles thought enough of him in September 2021 to hand him a three-year, $15 million extension. That deal soured fast, and the Kings shipped him to the Flyers in the 2023 three-team trade that also involved Columbus.
Long before any of that, he authored one of the great goaltending performances in college hockey history. On March 6, 2015, the Notre Dame freshman stopped 87 shots in a five-overtime loss to UMass, the longest game the sport has ever played at that level, and the save total still stands as an NCAA Division I record.
His best international work came in 2021, when he posted a .953 save percentage in seven games for Team USA at the World Championship and was named the tournament’s top goaltender.
Preseason play starts September 20 against Boston, which gives Petersen about a month to talk his way onto a contract with a club that had a loud offseason everywhere but in net.
