Capitals’ Logan Thompson Has Had Unique Path to NHL Stardom
The Washington Capitals have one of the best goaltending tandems in the Eastern Conference in Logan Thompson and Charlie Lindgren. The pair propelled their team to the best record in the Metropolitan Division last season with Thompson having a career year in wins and goals-against average (GAA).
Thompson, a 28-year-old Calgary native, has not followed a traditional path to the NHL. After going undrafted out of junior, playing a season of Canadian U Sports hockey, bouncing around the minor leagues, and then the better part of four seasons with the Vegas Golden Knights, Thompson landed with the Capitals in June 2024.
The goaltender impressed his new team so much in the 2024-25 season that in Jan. 2025, they signed him to a six-year contract with an average annual value of $5.85 million.
“Logan has demonstrated that he is one of the top goaltenders in the NHL this season and since he joined the league,” Capitals’ general manager Chris Patrick told ESPN after inking Thompson to his new contract. “With his size and exceptional athleticism, we are confident that this signing will enhance one of the most critical positions on our team, especially as he enters the prime years of his career.”
Undrafted Out of Junior
A Calgary native, Thompson played junior hockey for the Brandon Wheat Kings of the Western Hockey League (WHL) where he amassed a 63-41-10 record along with a .905 save percentage (SV%) and a 3.36 GAA. Undrafted out of junior, he enrolled at Brock University in Ontario so he could continue playing hockey while pursuing a degree in sports management.
“Pro hockey wasn’t even on my mind,” Thompson told The Athletic. “I was just a kid having fun. I had school on Monday and Tuesday. I would go home and play video games, drink beer and just be a college student (from ‘Logan Thompson’s pro dream nearly ended — then his rise to the Golden Knights began,’
For most players, moving from juniors to U Sports means their path to the NHL is closed, but Thompson made the most of his time in college. In the 2018-19 season, he amassed a .934 SV% and won the Ontario University Athletics West Rookie of the Year and Goalie of the Year Awards.
Starts and Stops in the Minor Leagues
In March 2019, after his season with Brock University was over, Thompson received an offer from the Adirondack Thunder of the ECHL to play on an amateur tryout contract. After appearing in eight games for the Thunder, he was released in April and then signed a professional tryout contract with the Binghamton Devils of the American Hockey League (AHL). He played in one game for the Devils before being signed to a one-year contract with the Hershey Bears.
For the 2019-20 season, Thompson played for the Bears’ ECHL affiliate, the South Carolina Stingrays. He played in 32 games for the team, earning a 23-8-1 record, 2.25 GAA, and a .929 SV%. That summer, he signed a two-year entry-level contract with the Golden Knights where his former coach from junior, Kelly McCrimmon, was now the general manager.
A Golden Opportunity in Las Vegas
Thompson started the 2020-21 season with Las Vegas’ AHL affiliate, the Henderson Silver Knights. He posted a 16-6-2 record with an impressive 1.96 GAA and .943 SV%. At the end of the season, he was awarded the AHL’s Aldege “Baz” Bastien Memorial Award as the league’s best goaltender. On Jan. 4, 2022, Thompson became the first U Sports goaltender to start an NHL game in over 30 years. A few weeks later, the Golden Knights signed him to a three-year, $2.3 million contract extension.
Thompson began the 2022-23 season as the Golden Knights’ starting goaltender due to injuries to Robin Lehner and Laurent Brossoit. He put up impressive numbers, becoming the first rookie goaltender named to an NHL All-Star Game since John Gibson in 2016. However, Thompson’s rookie season was halted in Feb. 2023 when he suffered a lower-body injury, which he reinjured again in March, causing him to miss the rest of the regular season. With Thompson watching from the sidelines, the Golden Knights went on to win their first Stanley Cup thanks to the heroics of previously unknown goaltender Adin Hill.
For the 2023-24 season, Thompson and Hill worked as a tandem, but Thompson was inconsistent over the course of the season, with injuries in November and December hampering his progress. He played in 46 games, earning a 25-14-5 record with a 2.70 GAA and .908 SV%. Thompson was named the team’s playoff starter but was replaced by Hill in Game 5 of the first round against the Dallas Stars, who beat the Golden Knights in seven games.
Thompson had been pulled after two consecutive losses despite having a career-high 43 saves in one of the games. After speaking with team management after the series, Thompson felt that McCrimmon and head coach Bruce Cassidy were firmly set on Hill as their starter going forward, so he asked the team for a trade that June.
Trade to the Capitals
While the 2024 NHL Entry Draft was underway, the Golden Knights traded Thompson to the Capitals for two third-round picks. Washington was keen to acquire another top-flight goaltender after trading Darcy Kuemper to the Los Angeles Kings for Pierre-Luc Dubois earlier in the summer.
The trade was a bit of a homecoming for Thompson who, as a member of the Capital’s ECHL affiliate in South Carolina, attended development camp in 2018 and 2019.
Thompson began the 2024-25 season sharing goaltending duties with Lindgren and posting a 22-2-3 record in his first 27 games with the club while earning a .925 SV% and 2.09 GAA, second in the NHL at the time behind Connor Hellebuyck. The Capitals wasted no time in locking Thompson down for the long term, signing him to a six-year extension in Jan. 2025.
Success in Washington
The 2024-25 season was an unqualified success for Thompson. He ranked fourth in voting for the Vezina Trophy, finishing the regular season with 26 goals saved above expected – which was third-best in the league. He lost only six games in regulation posting a 31-6-6 record.
As his goaltending partner Lindgren’s performance waned a bit last season, Thompson was rewarded by getting the starting role for the playoffs. He was one of the main factors in the Capitals’ first round victory over the Montreal Canadiens, and although not as sharp in the second round against Carolina, his aggregate playoff statistics were still quite good with a .917 SV% and a 2.41 GAA.
This season, Thompson is closing in on 100 career wins. He currently has 89 wins in 149 games played. If he reaches the milestone before playing in his 166th game, he will land in the top ten fastest in NHL history to do so.
The Capitals are hoping for a replay of last season’s success for Thompson. If Lindgren can find his game again this season, the pair could be the best goaltending tandem in the Eastern Conference. For Thompson, success will likely rest on remaining healthy, which has been difficult at times during his career. After a summer of reflection, Thompson is committed to his team’s success and proving the doubters wrong.
“Just want to win games, get back to where we were last year, keep proving people wrong. That’s my biggest mindset,” Thompson told The Hockey News. “I want to do my job and help get as many wins for the Washington Capitals as I can and be supportive of my teammates and supportive of (Charlie Lindgren) and just be each other’s biggest fan.”
Saunders: Problem With Steelers Secondary Isn’t What You Think — It’s Worse
The Pittsburgh Steelers spent their 2025 offseason revamping their defense, keeping it the league’s most-expensive unit while attempting to tailor its talents to do things it failed to do down the stretch run of the 2024 season: stop the Baltimore Ravens on the ground and slow down the Cincinnati Bengals through the air.
To deal with the latter goal, the Steelers shipped out All-Pro safety Minkah Fitzpatrick, replacing him with a collection of journeymen at that position, and instead reallocated those resources to the cornerback position, where the team spent $10 million in free agency on Darius Slay, and traded Fitzpatrick for Jalen Ramsey to go along with Joey Porter Jr. and give the team three starting caliber cornerback.
It represented a wholesale shift in approach compared to the last few years, when the Steelers had largely ignored the slot cornerback position and spent more at safety than almost anyone else in the league.
The idea was that investing more in cover corners would allow the Steelers to face a team like the Bengals, with multiple high-end receiving threats, and still be able to play whatever kind of defense they wanted against them.
The Steelers over the last few years, with players like Patrick Peterson and Donte Jackson in the secondary, were limited to mostly playing zone coverage against the likes of Ja’Marr Chase, Tee Higgins and company.
In Thursday’s loss in Cincinnati, they couldn’t cover anyone. They tried to go man-to-man, as was the plan. Porter was flagged for DPI. Ramsey was beaten 1-on-1. The Steelers tried to switch off who was covering which man. They tried to zone. They tried many different zones: Cover 3, Cover 2, quarters. They tried two-man — a combination of man and zone.
Tomlin and Teryl Austin rolled through the rolodex of defensive coverages with a dizzying speed, trying over a dozen combination. Absolutely nothing worked. The Steelers couldn’t cover routinely either Chase or Higgins, at any point throughout the entire game.
The dominant narrative on social media among Steelers fans after the game was that Tomlin and Austin wouldn’t or couldn’t make necessary adjustments, or that they weren’t prepared for what Cincinnati did. Nothing could be further from the truth, and that’s so much worse. Being unprepared or unwilling to change are relatively easy issues to fix. What the Steelers are dealing with is much more deep-seated.
“We double teamed (Chase) some, we double teamed (Higgins) some, had some mixes when required,” Tomlin said. “They’ve got depth of talent. Just like the one play (Iosivas) made down the middle, we were doubling (Chase and Higgins), and so they were one-on-one in that circumstance. There’s many ways you can analyze it, but the bottom line is they made more plays than we did.”
Furthermore, their focus on trying to stop those two opened up other gaping holes in their defense. They blitzed, and that didn’t routinely work. It also gave up big plays in the running game — by far the best day of the season for a beleaguered Cincinnati unit. The also lost track of secondary Cincinnati options like Noah Fant and Andrei Iosivas.
Instead of being able to handle Chase and Higgins in multiple ways, the Steelers’ inability to handle them in any way created cascading effects that destroyed the impacfulness of the entire defense.
How and why did this happen? There are few reasonable answers, and none of them present a rosy future picture for the Steelers:
Flacco knew what they were doing.
The Bengals certainly expected the man-heavy initial approach — Chase said as much in his post-game press conference. That’s not surprising. Most people were able to figure out the Steelers’ idea for handling the Bengals as laid out above.
But when the Steelers started to change defenses, they never once seemed to catch Flacco off guard, and they very rarely seemed to present him with a coverage that he didn’t have an answer for.
There is no defensive scheme that works when no one can cover anyone, so there’s that. But the Steelers also don’t, by rule, do a ton of disguising of their coverages, and when they usually do, it’s more of a feel call from the players on the field than anything else.
With the entire defense in scramble mode from the second quarter on, the disguises went out the window, and they were almost never able to make Flacco hold onto the ball long enough to let the pass rush get home.
But I don’t know how you can tell a defense that is routinely failing to execute its coverages to then start them from a different, more distant landmark in order to disguise intentions. The Steelers were so ineffective in coverage that they essentially limited how much variety in disguises they could even try.
Just a bad day?
Thursday nights are rough on everyone in the NFL. Heck, I’m tired and all I did was drive to Cincinnati.
But it makes some sense that the oldest team in the league would be more impacted by the lack of rest than another.
Slay is 34. Ramsey is 31. Chuck Clark, Juan Thornhill and Jabrill Peppers are 30. It would make sense that they’d have a harder time adjusting than the younger competitors on the other side of the ball.
This is the only explanation that isn’t devastatingly bad for the future prognosis of what’s going to happen to this defense.
They failed.
The Steelers went out and spent a lot of money and resources to stop the Bengals, and the players they got to do that job are not able to do that job.
The Eagles were right and Slay is cooked. The Dolphins were right and Ramsey isn’t the player he once was. Porter has not developed, can’t get past his penalty issues, and can’t be trusted to do the job he was drafted to do.
This outcome is, of course, irreversibly bad. Porter can still develop. Time doesn’t ever march backward for veterans like Slay and Ramsey. And the fact that I didn’t think the defense got any worse when Slay came out for a few play and Brandin Echols went in leads some credence to this idea.
One game is not proof, of course. But right now, it’s hard to say anything other than the Steelers’ entire offseason plan for stopping the Bengals — and for that matter, other teams with depth of receiving talent — was a failure.
“Yeah,” Tomlin said. “We won’t be defined by this performance, but it certainly was disappointing tonight.”
The Steelers will have another crack at the Bengals later this season. They also face a deep group of receivers in 10 days in Pittsburgh, in Week 8 against the Green Bay Packers. There are opportunities for redemption, but there are only so many teams like this on the schedule.
Even if they eventually figure out why they couldn’t execute almost any coverage routinely, even if it was just Thursday night weirdness, they failed in one of their major tasks they set out to accomplish this season — in an enormous moment.
With a win, the Steelers could have taken a commanding 3.5-game lead in the division, and essentially sink Cincinnati’s chances of mounting a comeback before Joe Burrow returns.
Instead, Cincinnati is again alive, and the Steelers will have to sweat out a tough upcoming stretch of their schedule to see if their lead in the AFC North holds.
They’d really better hope that this win doesn’t propel the Bengals into a climb to a playoff spot. If Cincinnati can pick apart this defense with Flacco, imagine what Joe Burrow could do to it in the postseason.
