- Brandon Bussi won games at $25,000 apiece last season, the cheapest rate in the NHL
- Jet Greaves and Jakub Dobes came next, and both cashed in months later
- Read below for the full top 10 and where each goalie lands in 2026-27
Brandon Bussi won hockey games for about $25,000 apiece last season. Nobody in the league came close to that.
Pro Hockey Rumors ran the cost-per-win math on every goalie who played at least 25 games in 2025-26, entry-level deals excluded, and Bussi sits alone at the top. He went 31-6-2 on a $775,000 cap hit for a Carolina team that asked him to handle one of the heaviest defensive workloads in hockey.
The path there was not normal. Undrafted out of Western Michigan, four years buried in Boston’s minor league system, a stretch working at Chipotle along the way, a league minimum deal with Florida, waived in training camp, then claimed by the Hurricanes on Oct. 5.
Twenty-four appearances later he had 20 wins, the fastest any goaltender has reached that number in NHL history.
Jet Greaves came in second at $31,000 per win on an $812,500 cap hit, and Jakub Dobes was third at $33,000 on $965,000 in Montreal. Both turned that season into money, Greaves with a three-year, $15MM extension in Columbus and Dobes with a three-year deal at $5.36MM per year.
Here is the full top 10:
| # | Goalie | 2025-26 Team | Cost Per Win |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Brandon Bussi | Hurricanes | $25K |
| 2 | Jet Greaves | Blue Jackets | $31K |
| 3 | Jakub Dobes | Canadiens | $33K |
| 4 | Dustin Wolf | Flames | $37K |
| 5 | Arturs Silovs | Penguins | $45K |
| 6 | Scott Wedgewood | Avalanche | $48K |
| 7 | Akira Schmid | Golden Knights | $55K |
| 8 | Casey DeSmith | Stars | $67K |
| 9 | Eric Comrie | Jets | $69K |
| 10 | David Rittich | Islanders | $71K |
Cost per win leans hard on team quality, so a cheap backup on a contender will always beat a good goalie on a bad club. Scott Wedgewood is the one name on the list with elite rate stats to go with the price, a .921 save percentage and 2.02 goals-against average with 31 wins on a $1.5MM hit after Mackenzie Blackwood got hurt.
Bussi finished his year by starting the last three games of the Stanley Cup Final and shutting out Vegas in Game 6:
Most of these deals are already gone. Wolf starts a seven-year, $52.5MM extension this fall, Silovs is up to $2.8MM in Pittsburgh, and Schmid signed for $2MM per year in Florida after the Panthers traded a third-rounder for him.
Carolina saw it coming and signed Bussi to a three-year extension at $1.9MM per season during the year, so the cheapest goalie in hockey is still theirs for 2026-27.
