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Joe Woll aged off the Top 25 Under 25 this year just in time to leave four other goalie prospects in his wake. Dennis Hildeby and Artur Akhtyamov are both heading for age 23 this year. Timofei Obvintsev is halfway to 20 after being drafted in his second year of eligibility and Vyacheslav Peksa is the middle child who turns 22 this month.
Peksa is likely best known as the guy who isn't Hildeby or Akhtyamov and isn't new like the fellow whose name we haven't learned to spell yet.
| Vyacheslav Peksa | Vitals |
|---|---|
| Age as of July 1 | 21.84 |
| Position | G |
| Height | 6'2" |
| Weight (lbs) | 163 |
| Shoots | L |
| Draft Year | 2021 |
| Draft Number | 185 |
The Player
Peksa was born in Magnitogorsk in Russia, which is an industrial city in the Ural mountains, not a busy, modern metropolis like Moscow. It's a city of the size of London or Oshawa in Ontario, but it was modeled in the Soviet era after America's steel producing cities like Pittsburgh.
Peksa started his hockey career with Metallurg, a successful club that turns the revenue of a smaller arena in a working-class city into a serial contender. He had been the ninth goalie in the Magnitogorsk sports school first team and could only practice with the second team before he gradually worked up to backup on the first team, but he knew he would never dislodge the starter there. He moved to Kazan to find a new hockey opportunity.
Kazan is a much larger city, more like Ottawa, and it's culturally mixed with a near equal mix of Russians and Tatars. Kazan was planned as an industrial and scientific centre and there is an emphasis on the tech industry in recent years. Peksa started out with the local Dynamo club (an old Soviet name for sports clubs you'll find all over the region) because Ak Bars had no openings. He wanted advancement, so he tried a different league that had junior teams he might find a spot with, and got in with a team only to be traded suddenly to Ak Bars to play in their system. His mother finally moved to Kazan to live with him since he was settled there. And while he played no games in his first season, he moved to to their MHL (top junior league) team the next season where he was second chair. He was the dominating starter on that team in his next year, and one of the best goalies in the MHL.
Ak Bars has, in recent years, gone pretty hard for goalies and they are certainly a source of NHL drafted prospects including Kazan native Artur Akhtyamov. Timur Bilyalov has been their starter for some time, and cracking the KHL lineup has therefore been difficult. With both Bilyalov and Amur Miftakhov, a Tampa draftee, blocking access to any starts in the KHL, Peksa graduated from junior to the VHL in 2022-2023 where he was excellent in one season there as the starter.
In spring 2023, Peksa signed his ELC with the Leafs and spent all of last season in Newfoundland with the Growlers as one of three goalies who split the starts fairly evenly. By save %, Peksa was the worst of the three, behind Luke Cavallin and Dryden McKay. McKay is 26 and has just signed an AHL contract, and Cavallin is 23 and currently not signed. So of the three, Peksa is the most likely to improve. How much is the question we try to answer when we do these rankings.
One year in the ECHL playing 19 games is not very revealing. Moving to St. John's was his second major culture shock hockey move, and he's about to have another. The expectation is that Peksa will land in the ECHL, now the Cincinnati Cyclones, while Hildeby takes first chair with the Marlies. Akhtyamov may well join Peksa there, but that's likely one of many things training camp will decide.
There was a story this summer of a Russian prospect for another team who struggled with isolation in the AHL last season, living in a hotel and having no one to speak to, and stymied by the language barrier with the team. He want back to Russia. Peksa made out fine in St. John's where Russians from prior seasons had said there were some Russian-speakers in town. But playing in Cincinnati will be a new challenge of a different sort, another culture shock. We shouldn't downplay how tough that is, even for an effervescent and charming guy like him.
Peksa put on a fun performance at the Leafs development camp where he and Akhtyamov were relaxed while the invites played it serious. He made some fans there, but nothing about his or Akhtyamov's play should be taken seriously.
You won't see much in terms of scouting reports here. He's described everywhere as athletic, and in his interview linked above, he mentions training in "acrobatics" when young. I assume that's gymnastics. He also took up judo for one year as he flitted from sport to sport for a time. All of that gives him good background skills for modern goaltending, but no one has had a chance to seriously watch him very much.
The Votes
Peksa has a big, big spread in rankings. Everywhere from 13 to not ranked. A lot of those low votes are "he's a goalie" rankings, which is one of the solutions we have to sorting out these mysterious prospects.
| Voter | Vote |
|---|---|
| Cathy | NA |
| Brian | 21 |
| Species | NA |
| Adam | NA |
| Hardev | 19 |
| dhammm | NA |
| Cameron S | 23 |
| Hound Line | 25 |
| brysplace | 17 |
| Catch-67 | 23 |
| Sclodiggity | 23 |
| shinson93 | NA |
| The Bag | 19 |
| Zone Entry | 13 |
| Weighted Average | 22.36 |
| Highest Vote | 13 |
| Lowest Vote | 25 |
How to Rank a Goalie
Think back to the pandemic T25 when I made people vote on draft picks. The conversation around that exercise was about trying to vote on the idea of a person who had nothing, not even a name, to judge from. It was a ranking based on pure probability of draft pick success, and hidden behind that was an assessment of the Leafs' ability to draft at least at the average or perhaps better.
For goalies, that idea holds sway even when we can imagine the person, moving from home to a new and multicultural city from his working class backwater, and then whipsawing from Toronto to a place like St. John's that might have seemed a little easier than the big city. Because a successful goalie prospect can be extremely valuable to a team, but are very, very hard to judge, they get ranked based on the idea that the big uncertainty and the big potential payoff matter more than Joe over there, who we're convinced isn't a future star. This requires some willingness to ignore that the potential outcome for a goalie has as big a pile of unhappy futures as for any other player.
If goalies as a class are worth more than skaters, does that matter for our ranking purposes. If the potential return on the investment of one sixth-round pick rises because the player taken was a goalie, is that part of the assessment of the player taken? Peksa is an individual not an instance of class goalie, but he's on the cusp of his latest culture shock move with only 19 games in the ECHL behind him, so he's very hard to judge as an individual.
One way in which being a goalie matters is that where a goalie is picked (outside a very few stars) doesn't tell you the same thing about future success as skaters. A lot of goalies are drafted from rounds three through to seven. In most sections of the draft, goalies are as likely to succeed as skaters, with the exception of the first round after the top 5.
In the very dregs of the draft, where Peksa was taken, a goalie is more likely to succeed than a skater. But that statement papers right over the very tiny base chance. A little more than very little is still very little. If Peksa was going to be an NHL difference-maker, we'd have some clues by now that said to me he's not it. I don't actually think a goalie is worth more, however; the lottery might have a bigger prize, but the odds are so small that it's still the same longshot bet.
A more optimistic take on Peksa is that when he got a chance at the men's level in Kazan, he was a legitimate starter, and he has years yet to grow into his adult game fully. However, his success has been in the VHL, which is below the level he "should" be at for a goalie his age:
Brian Stewart
The Opinions
dhammm: Hilarious guy. I'd like him to make it just because I love his attitude. He'll need to show a little more even at the ECHL level to threaten that as a possibility, though.
brysplace: He's a goalie! That already makes him more valuable than half the eligible players on this list. What other position can have a series-defining impact as that of a goalie?
Peksa had a down year from what I've read, but since goalies are difficult to understand (for me at least), ones who've had some success at some point at the professional level will always spark hope in my heart. I miss The Cat.
Zone Entry: It’s so hard to find really good goalies, so prospects with any kind of potential I think of as more valuable. I don’t have serious hopes for Peksa but since we’re not exactly swimming in A-level sure-fire prospects, it was easy to find room on my list for him.
Sclodiggity: Some good numbers and some bad numbers but his bad numbers in the ECHL last year aren’t encouraging. Still, he’s a goalie and still young. If he shows improvement, fewer names to leapfrog to get to the Marlies and potential NHL time compared to other positions.
Hardev: It's been hard to separate Peksa from Akhtyamov since they've progressed at about the same time as each other. He wasn't good in the ECHL last year, and he hadn't played in the KHL in the time that he was there. It's always said that goalies can switch from awful to amazing at any time, but in my experience of all the goalies the Leafs have run through the minors, most guys just don't have anything to offer and the ones that do push beyond and make it have years of success that build confidence. Goalies aren't magic, they grow and develop like all players do. Woll – to name the only (maybe, hopefully) successful example of a homegrown goalie for the Leafs in decades – built his game and we saw him improve. All the rest of the guys I watched – like Kaskisuo, Bibeau, and Pogge – didn't. They peaked somewhere below the NHL when it came to their positioning, reflexes, mobility, reads, and mental strength. Peksa didn't have a good first year in North America. Hopefully he can be average or better for the Cyclones this year. In hindsight, I'm kind of surprised I had him on the higher end of the list.
Brigstew: I have little to add about him as a player, but I'll say that there is no more entertaining and fun loving prospect in Toronto's system on and off the ice. I didn't use that in deciding my ranking for him, but I am using it to root for him so hard. He leads the whole system in vibes/60.
Your turn! What's your take on the goalie middle child?
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