Minnesota Wild goalie Filip Gustavsson is one of the game's premier goaltenders, and this story from THN''s Sept. 23, 2023 edition chronicles Gustavsson's road to NHL greatness.
Minnesota Wild goalie Filip Gustavsson is having a terrific season, posting a 13-4-3 record through his first 20 appearances this season. But in this story from THN's Sept. 29, 2023 edition, writer Carol Schram chronicled Gustavsson's ascent through the ranks of the NHL.
MINNESOTA NICE
By Carol Schram
For Filip Gustavsson, life is good in the State of Hockey.
The 25-year-old is armed with a new three-year contract after narrowly avoiding a summer arbitration hearing. He’s adjusting his daily routines around his first child, Vollrad, who is named after his great-grandfather and was born back home in Sweden on June 16.
And he’s feeling calm and comfortable in Minnesota, where he has flourished since his trade from the Ottawa Senators in July 2022.
During five seasons in the Ottawa organization, Gustavsson got into just 27 NHL games, putting up a record of 10-13-3, with a 3.12 goals-against average and .905 save percentage.
With the Wild last year, he gained momentum as the season wore on. After the all-star break, he started 19 of Minnesota’s final 34 games, posting a 1.95 GAA and .938 SP. That earned him the starting job in the playoffs, where he prevailed in double overtime in Game 1 against the Dallas Stars, making 51 saves on 53 shots. All told, Gustavsson started five of the Wild’s six games in their first-round loss while giving up just 12 goals.
It was valuable high-stakes experience after a regular season where he finished with a 2.10 GAA and .931 SP to support his record of 22-9-7. Among goalies with at least 25 starts, those numbers were second only to fellow Swede and Vezina winner Linus Ullmark of the Boston Bruins – who put together a breakout campaign of his own.
In the wake of Jacob Markstrom’s second-place finish in Vezina voting in 2021-22 and third-place honors for Robin Lehner in 2018-19, is Swedish goaltending making a comeback? “For a long time, it felt like everyone was talking about Finnish goaltenders being so good,” Gustavsson said. “Now, it’s the Russian goalies, with (Igor) Shesterkin and (Andrei) Vasilevskiy.
“And then Ullmark stepping up last year, it feels like the Swedish guys kind of got away a little bit after (Henrik) Lundqvist. We need to evolve and be more recognized as a good-goalie nation again.”
Lundqvist, “of course,” was an idol for Gustavsson, who was seven when the NHL rookie backstopped Sweden to Olympic gold in Turin in 2006, and he was 14 when ‘The King’ won his Vezina in 2012. Other favorites were Semyon Varlamov, Carey Price and Braden Holtby. Also, some guy named Marc-Andre Fleury, “a pretty flashy goalie” who earned plenty of bandwidth in the highlight packages that Gustavsson devoured in his hometown of Skelleftea, an industrial city of 74,000.
Fleury played his first NHL game when Gustavsson was just five. Now 38, Fleury is living up to his reputation as a first-class teammate. “Every time you see him on TV or videos or in person, he’s very nice and a little goofy,” Gustavsson said. “That’s how he is to every guy he sees or talks to. Those people are very nice to have around and see on a daily basis, because they make you happy. They make you more relaxed and calm, in a way, instead of being on your toes all the time.”
Fleury does keep his teammates on alert with his penchant for pranks. While he declined to go into detail, Gustavsson said the frequency of the practical jokes picked up during the second half of last season, with “everyone kind of expecting it to be him,” and “some good laughs around the locker room.”
Both listed at 6-foot-2, Gustavsson and Fleury literally see eye to eye. But their playing styles are polar opposites. “I don’t make those flashy saves,” Gustavsson said. “I’m more, I would say, conservative and calm. I try and be more in the right position to either get to the next rebound or be in the right position to take the first shot. One of my strengths is to play around the post, when the puck comes really close around the net and wraparounds and stuff like that.”
Goalies are always hungry for action, and Fleury is starting the season needing just eight wins to pass Patrick Roy for second place on the all-time list. But rather than competing for starts, the Wild tandem aims to bring out the best in each other. “We’re both good sports,” Gustavsson said. “When he didn’t play as good as he wanted to, I played, and I played good. He got time to find his game again, and then, when I didn’t play good, he jumped in. It didn’t feel like it was a bad mood between us, not getting the starts when we’re sitting on the sidelines. It felt like we’re helping each other to play our best when we got the chance to play.”
If things had been a little different, the pair could have made each other’s acquaintance years earlier. Just weeks after Fleury hoisted the Stanley Cup in 2016, the Penguins drafted Gustavsson in the second round (55th overall). Before he was dealt to the Senators as part of a package that brought Derick Brassard to Pittsburgh at the 2017-18 trade deadline, Gustavsson went through two summer development camps at the Penguins’ training facility. Both years, the team had mostly dispersed after its Cup celebrations. “The only two guys we saw, (Sidney) Crosby was still there doing some stuff, and (Evgeni) Malkin was there one day,” Gustavsson said.
The trade to Ottawa came less than two months after Gustavsson earned best-goalie honors at the 2018 World Junior Championship, backstopping Sweden to a silver medal. When his Swedish League obligations with Lulea were completed that spring, he joined the AHL’s Belleville Senators for his first seven games in North America.
A month later, he was back in Europe as Sweden’s third goaltender at the World Championship in Denmark. Slotting in behind Anders Nilsson and Magnus Hellberg, he didn’t get to play. But he did gain valuable experience from being part of a stacked team headlined by veterans such as Mika Zibanejad, Rickard Rakell, Adrian Kempe, Hampus Lindholm, Adam Larsson and Mattias Ekholm, with Nilsson holding down the fort in net. “Just hanging around all those established NHL guys and seeing how professional they were and wanting to win was incredible,” Gustavsson said.
Played in Copenhagen, barely 15 miles from the Swedish border, the boisterous championship contest against Switzerland felt like a home game for the Swedes. When Nilsson stopped Nino Niederreiter in the fifth round of the shootout to clinch gold, the celebration was on.
Asked to pinpoint what brought him success last season, Gustavsson pointed to the sense of comfort he and his wife Rebecka felt as soon as they arrived in the Twin Cities. After bouncing back and forth between Ottawa and AHL Belleville for two years, he was relieved to be pencilled immediately into Minnesota’s opening-night lineup. Fellow Scandinavians Jonas Brodin, Joel Eriksson Ek and Mats Zuccarello helped him learn the ropes with advice in his native language. It’s not exactly South Beach, but the Minnesota weather is a non-issue for someone hailing from Skelleftea, located nearly 500 miles north of Stockholm, not far below the Arctic Circle.
During the summer, Gustavsson trains through nearly endless daylight with a crew that has now been together for five years. The group is comprised mainly of Skelleftea locals and includes Larsson and Rakell along with Viktor Arvidsson, Marcus Pettersson and Islanders defenseman Sebastian Aho.
In November, Gustavsson will experience Sweden’s shorter, darker late-autumn days when he and the Wild join the Senators, Toronto Maple Leafs and Detroit Red Wings for a four-game set as part of the NHL Global Series.
For the players, it’s a special opportunity to play in front of loved ones who might not be able to make it to North America to see NHL hockey. Gustavsson says most of his friends have tickets already. His grandparents and Rebecka’s family will also be in attendance.
When Fleury moves on from Minnesota, another Swede is coming to the blue paint. The Wild drafted Jesper Wallstedt in the first round (20th overall) in 2021. In his first season in North America last year, Wallstedt split duties with Zane McIntyre on the AHL’s Iowa Wild, finishing with a 2.68 GAA and .908 SP. He was ranked eighth among all prospects in THN’s Future Watch 2023.
But Gustavsson isn’t looking ahead, neither to the near nor distant future. He’s focused on the now, settled at last with a multi-year contract and some financial security. Is there a risk he sets his expectations too high or tries to do too much this year? “It’s a lot more pressure, but I don’t really try and look at that – that I’m making more money,” he said. “It feels like that’s for after my hockey career. It’s still a team sport. Everyone has the same responsibility for the team to play good.”
Before the trade, Gustavsson had visited Minnesota just once, when he played the second of back-to-back games in November 2021. But it hasn’t taken long for it to start to feel like home. “I don’t think I really understood how big the State of Hockey is and how much hockey meant to people here in this area,” he said. “The ‘Minnesota Nice’ saying that the people are very welcoming and very easy to talk to? It’s true. We’ve really enjoyed coming here.”