Sabres rookie, Devon Levi a top chase in the 2023-24 Series One Young Guns class
Hockey card collectors got a nice surprise when Upper Deck announced an early release for its flagship Series One set. Typically, the hobby has to wait until mid-November to dive into one of the hobbies most anticipated sets of the year. However, the product is ready for distribution and will be available to the public on October 18th.
Series One is always a fun product to rip into as it contains the highly coveted Young Guns rookie cards of the league's top freshmen. So when the checklist dropped last week I was excited to check it out and see which top rookies I should be hunting.
In this five-part series, I will be ranking the top five chase cards in the set.
The fourth player in this series I am going to highlight is card #237, Devon Levi.
Levi is an interesting prospect because unlike most of the highly anticipated rookies in this set, he wasn’t a high draft pick. He was selected in the seventh-round with the 212th pick in the Draft by Buffalo. It wasn’t until his stellar World Junior performance before most people knew who Levi was.
The 21-year-old netminder was named to the 2021 Canadian World Junior team where he won the starting job and backstopped Canada to a Silver medal. Despite not winning gold, Levi was named top goalie of the tournament with a 6-1 record recording three shutouts, a .75 goals-against-average, and a .964 save percentage. Nasty stuff.
The Sabres draftee continued his torrid play in the net at Northeastern University where he finished his collegiate career with a 1.90 GAA and a .942 SV% through 66 games. He also was named a finalist for the Hobey Baker Award as college hockey’s top player of the year in 2021-22.
Like most of the rookies in this Young Guns class, Levi made his pro debut last season for the Sabres where he got into seven games and had a 2.94 GAA and a .905 SV%. Not great, but the kid was 20 years old and it’s a hard league to adjust to.
There is a lot of hype for Levi as a young Canadian goalie prospect and he’ll be given every opportunity to try and win the net in Buffalo this season to try and lead this team to its first playoff berth since 2011.
eBay presales of this card are well over $100 Canadian and have been listed for as high as $130. This is somewhat surprising given he is a goalie and that position doesn’t typically get much hobby love.
Maybe that's changing?